The Affair to Remember
by fangirl1982
Summary: Imagine if Jack and Gabrielle met randomly in a bar before she started at All Saints. Follows the events of seasons 9 and 10 from their perspective. I apologise for typos and spelling mistakes, I am doing the best I can on a Polish keyboard!Feedback loved
1. Chapter 1

Title: **An Affair to Remember **Jack/Gabrielle

Imagine if Jack and Gabrielle had a one-night stand without knowing who the other was. Follows the events of seasons 9 and 10 based on this idea.

Of course I don't own anything. If I did I'd be writing scripts, not fan fiction. But my mate went to WAPPA to Virginia Gay if that impresses anyone :p

Rating: **M**

_I said this before with **The Bet** but please, people, **do not read this** if the idea of sexual abuse makes you squeamish, espiecally m/m peadophile rape. The way Jack has been written and Traval plays him I always got the feeling Jack had a lot of sexual hangups and knowing he'd been abused made a lot of sense. I've known people who've been sexually abused and use sex and promiscuity as a substitute for healthy relationships and wanted to explore that element in Jack's life. I'm happy to explain this more in an email. This is my own interpretation of it. If you disagree, feel free to email me , I have been known in the past to edit material when someone has made a valid point. (Having said that, this is a WIP, not a finished story like **The Bet**, so it may be a hackneyed editing.)_

_Now, onto the story..._

"Can't say I've ever seen a guy looked so interested in a book."

Jack Quade looked up to see a reasonably attractive woman standing in front of him, beer in hand. He smiled. He was kind of i the mood for company. "And no pictures, either," he deadpanned.

He closed the book and she saw what he was reading; _Gone With the Wind_. "Ooh, I love that book," she said. "Never known a guy to read it, though."

Jack shrugged. "I've always liked historical fiction and there was something very gutsy about Scarlett that appealed to me. She was a far better role model than anything I had at home."

The woman was intrigued. "Can I sit down?" she asked. Jack nodded and gestured towards the empty chair across from him. She sat. "My mane's Gabrielle," she said. "I got here two days ago from Queensland and I don't know anyone. I'm a nurse and I was told this is where everyone hangs out."

Jack made a face. "God, you guys give me so much trouble," he said, thinking about Deanna and Terri. "And it's Jack."

"You're a doctor, I take it?" she asked. Jack nodded. "I haven't exactly been impressed with you guys at times, either."

Jack found himself laughing. "That's not it, I have a tendency to fall for women who are completely wrong for me. The last one - well, she managed to wreak havoc on the ward before being ousted. I haven't lived it down yet."

There was a reflective note in his voice that intrigued Gabrielle. This wasn't an arrogant doctor who expected any nurse he wanted to put out for him. There was loneliness and regret there. "You want to tell me about it?" she asked gently. "I know you don't know me but maybe it will be easier when it's not someone you work with. I know _that_ well enough," she added, thinking of her very ex Steve and how he'd humiliated her into quitting one hospital after he'd slept with her best friend, another nurse.

Jack smiled ruefully. He didn't know why but the idea of talking to a stranger appealed to him. "I thought she really liked me and that we were really compatible, but it turned out she was using me as a backer to get the job she wanted. She went so far as to accuse the head of department of sexually harassing her and using me to back her story. He had a hart attack from the stress. Everyone hated here ad I felt awful that my support of her meant she could do the things she did." He shrugged. "Still feel a bit awful about it, to tell the truth."

Gabrielle whistled. "That's pretty bad," she agreed. "Have you seen her since?"

Jack shook his head. "She tried to get back with me - I really don't know if she really liked me or just saw having a surgeon as a boyfriend as a good career move. I look back on our relationship and wonder if any of those little things counted, like the way she felt like she'd just melt into me when I held her - did I really make her feel that way or was she just putting it on because she worked out I like to feel needed and pushed my buttons?" He took another sip of beer and shook his head as if shaking of bad memories. "But I'm being all sooky and boring you."

Gabrielle shook her head. "No you're not. I kind of get where you're coming from. My ex drank a lot and cheated on me and even though I know the problem lay with him, not me, I still wonder if there's something I could have done, like what is it about me that couldn't keep him faithful?" She didn't know why she had just told Jack that, only that it felt good to talk to someone who didn't know her - the same advice she had given him minutes before. All her girlfriends back home judged the situation based on what they knew, but with Jack, he was completely objective.

"My dad screwed around on my stepmum all the time - that's how I was conceived, so you can imagine how well she took to me - and she was gorgeous, the perfect wife and mum, at least to her two sons. It wasn't about what she did or didn't do, it rarely is, or at least from what I've seen. Some me are just jerks."

"But you're not." She felt lightheaded, and she knew it wasn't from the beer.

"If you mean and I inclined to screw around on my girlfriends, no. I saw how destructive my dad's behavior was and I never wanted to turn out like him. I try to be honest with what I want out of a relationship. If nothing else, you get nothing but trouble out of promising a relationship when you just want to get laid and promising to be faithful when you know you can't do it."

"That's very mature," she said, and she wondered how old Jack was. Mid-late twenties... younger than Steve, but wiser, at least when it came to relationships. "How come you keep having trouble in relationships then?"

He smiled ruefully. "Appalling judgment in women," he admitted. "My girlfriend before Deanna - this was the one who cried sexual harassment - was hung over over her late husband but I was determined to make her fall in love with me. You know the bit in _Gone With the Wind_ where Rhett's talking about feeling like there are three people in bed when Scarlett's mind turns to Ashley?" Gabrielle nodded. "It was like that. She ended up calling it off 'cos she couldn't take the talk about us and I vowed I was never getting involved with a colleague again... that lasted me all of fifteen months."

"At least you're honest about it," Gabrielle said. "I've seen so many people - women in particular - who just never learn. i was only ever involved with one colleague and that was enough for me. It can backfire so easily."

"Amen to that," Jack said, thinking momentarily about Charlotte and the fact it still hurt to think about the baby. "But this talk's making me sad. What brings you from Queensland?"

"Got bored of being a farm girl," she said. "Growing up I always wanted to live in the city and a few weeks ago I finally decided to just do it."

"How are you finding it."

"It's big... and yet small. I'm used to having wide open spaces everywhere so everything seems so cramped. But there's a vibrancy here that I like."

"I've lived in Sydney all my life. I've traveled but I can't imagine living anywhere else. It's a great place, I think you'll really like it once you settle in."

The ended up talking for several hours. Jack was surprised at how much he enjoyed himself. He'd been distancing himself from his female colleagues since the Deanna debacle, not wanting to let anyone get to close. He was surprised at how much he missed interacting with women on a personal level... and the fact Gabrielle wasn't exactly bad-looking didn't hurt...

Gabrielle couldn't believe she had found a good-looking, intelligent, informative guy just by walking into a bar. They certainly didn't make them like Jack where she was from. He was so interesting, made her laugh - and made her feel something she hadn't felt in ages.

When he went to go, she asked him if he was driving, because she'd watched what he drank - years with Steve and she was very good at monitoring how much people drank - and when he said he only lived a few minutes walk away, she offered him a lift. She was strangely reluctant to have the evening end yet.

Jack was grateful for the lift. He wasn't ready to say goodbye to her yet. Like a gentleman, he helped her with her jacket, and there was no denying their chemistry when he fingers brushed her bare arm. She jumped slightly, and he found the reaction enchanting. Gabrielle clearly wasn't a woman used to working a man's sexuality and he liked that. Her reaction may have been awkward, but it was genuine. He wondered if he should put his hand on her back then decided against it, since _she_ was leading _him_ to her car.

They talked for a few more minutes on the short drive home and kept talking sitting in the stationary car in the driveway of the house he shared with his colleague, Dan Goldman. Finally he took the plunge and leaned over to kiss her.

She tasted nice, like beer but also something fresh and sweet. He ran his tongue over her lips and felt her trembling against him. "Scared?" he asked, even though he knew she wasn't.

"No," she whispered. She hadn't been kissed like this before, and Jack hadn't even gotten around to putting his tongue in her mouth. He was taking his time, running his fingers along her face... she wondered what he would be like in bed. She had a burning desire to get her jacket off so he could touch her bare arms like he had when she had helped her get it on. She struggled out of it awkwardly.

He laughed softly. "What's so funny?" she asked, a little crossly.

"You. You're cute. You don't have much experience with men, do you?" Gabrielle squirmed. "That's not a bad thing, believe me. It's nice knowing you don't know how to fake a response."

"I don't want to be bad at this," she admitted, thinking momentarily of Steve and wondering if she had been better, would he have been faithful?

He smiled at her in the darkness. No, she wasn't like Deanna, calm and collected in her ability to control men sexually, and he liked that. "You're not bad, just a little inexperienced. I'm not about to hold that against you." He kissed her again, working her out of her jacket as he did, flicking his tongue into her mouth, kissing her deeply, trying to restrain himself from the hunger he suddenly felt for her, knowing he had to take his time with her or she'd freak out.

After a few minutes she was shivering with excitement and lust - and a little apprehension. She had never done this before, never hooked up with someone she'd met that day. But it felt somehow right for all she didn't know what she was supposed to do... "Is this where you invite me in for coffee?" she asked shyly.

Jack felt something stir in him - a cowardly instinct to tell her what she wanted to hear. After all, everyone knew that nothing you said counted when it was just a one-night stand, you said all sorts of euphamisms to get your way. But not this time. He choked back the words that would be easy to say and told the truth. "This is where I ask you to sleep with me and probably don't see you again after tomorrow morning."

His words were cutting in their honesty but she found herself respecting him for it. She had known all along this wasn't likely to be anything more than a one-nighter, for all that people said all kinds of euphamisms to the contrary. To have Jack put it so bluntly was a little confronting, but...

She was a single girl with no ties to anyone and what's more, a fairly good instinct about people. And her instincts told her Jack wasn't going to screw her around, for all that he'd been honest about not being interested in a relationship. And she was attracted to him. God, she was attracted to him. "OK," she agreed shyly.

It was, needless to say, a new experience for Jack. He wasn't exactly used to being told yes after bluntly propositioning a woman. It was easy when he just had to say all the right things and do all the right things in an unspoken agreement between two people who knew all the bullshit you told to get laid, but this... He kissed her quickly and squeezed her hand. "OK," he parroted her, and got out of the car.

She got out and locked it, and as she walked towards him, he wrapped his arm around her waist, drawing her in close to her. He kissed the side of jer head, then angled he so he could kiss her mouth. She responded eagerly. This was more like it. She touched him shyly, running her hands down his arms, across the back of his neck - it was awkward and uncertain, like she was sure she was going to be thrown off any second for being too bold or just not doing the right thing, but that was part of her charm and from being very attracted to her he found himself being turned on. "I think I should get you inside before I make a complete ass of myself on the drive," he said huskily. He pulled away from her slightly and took her hand in his, leading her to the front door.

His housemate Dan was, typically, playing playstation. He brightened when he saw Jack, because playstation wasn't nearly as fun on your own, then frowned slightly when he saw Gabrielle. So Jack was otherwise occupied tonight. Which in itself was odd, because Jack _never_ brought women home - and as far as Dan knew, didn't go out with them either. Deanna's manipulation and betrayal had hurt him deeply then he'd ever admitted, but after two months of living with someone, you could work out these things. Jack was terrified of getting involved with someone and having it backfire.

"Dan, this is Gabrielle," Jack introduced them. "This is my housemate, Dan, who is a compulsive playstation player."

"I have a brother just like you," Gabrielle said. Jack smiled. From the way Gabrielle had described him, the guy did actually sound a bit liek Dan; the quintessetial computer and gaming nerd.

"I'm going to be in my room," Jack said, gripping Gabrielle's hands, suddenly feeling nervous. His desire to be honest didn't stretch quite so far as to tell his housemate that he was getting laid and to absolutely not come in. Not that you needed much of a stretch of the imagination to come to that conclusion.

He led Gabrielle to his room and for reasons unknown, she headed straight for his book collection. After all, a guy who would read _Gone With the Wind_ in a bar had some interesting reading habits. She frowned. "I don't understand these words," she said.

He came behind her and placed his hands on her hips, trailing kisses along her neck, laughing softly as he did. "I'm fluent in German, Russian and French, and I won't read the English translation if I can get hold of the original - you always lose something in the translation. I can be a real prat if you want me to and rattle off a whole bunch of dead foreign writers but I never understood how you can be interested in a book you can't read." Dan had made his opinions known on that, saying Jack's book collection was good for a bonfire and not much else.

"You'd be surprised how many women think being bi-lingual is hot. Bet it gets you laid heaps," Gabrielle couldn't help but quipping. She liked that he hadn't felt the urge to brag about an accomplishment like this from the begining. Steve, she knew, would hate someone who was both highly intelligent and highly educated. The thought made her smile.

"I personally never got _why_ someone would think the fact I can read Tolstoy in Russian was hot, but yeah, I did use that one a few times," Jack admitted. He liked that he could be so honest with her. He moved his hands from her hips to around her waist, clasping hers in his, threading their fingers together.

"I can just see you sitting in some dark cafe with - what's the book called?"

"Tolstoy's the author," he corrected her automatically in a way that didn't make her feel the least bit inferior for never having heard of the famous writer. "And... guilty as charged." He held her tighter against him, if that were possible, and began nibbling on her ear until he got the result he wanted, she closed her eyes and began sighing in pleasure. Now that he had her mind of those books, he swung her into his arms and carried her to his bed. They started making out, him taking things as slow as he could manage even though he was feeling increasingly turned on by her. He couldn't believe how hot her awkward, inecperienced touch was making him but there it was. He wanted to rip her clothes off and bury himself inside her and had to keep reminded himself that it was her shyness that appealed to him and he couldn't do anything that would make her freak out...

A thought occoured to him. "Shit," he said, so completely distracted for a moment that he dragged both of them out of the enjoyable reverie they were in.

"What?"

"Just wait there for a sec, OK? I have to go make sure of something." He left a slightly bewildered Gabrielle on his bed, wanting him to come back and touch her the way he had been doing. She loved how much time he was investing in kissing her, touching her... he made her pant and long to get his shirt off. She wanted to feel his bare skin...

... "Uh, Dan, I hate to bother you, but -"

Dan couldn't help but grinning like an idiot. "I knew you'd do this." He'd said so to Ricki two months ago."Bathroom cabinet."

"Thanks."

"Uh, Jack?"

"What?"

"What is this exactly? I mean, I've never seen you with anyone since Deanna and... look, I'm sorry if I'm prying but I just want to make sure you're not doing this for the wrong reasons."

Jack looked as though he'd given the matter a lot of thought. "I had no intention of bringing her home," he admitted. "But we talked for hours and really clicked and I was upfront about what I wanted from her - I don't think she wants anything more from me, either." He was silent for a second and Dan could just about _see_ Jack wandering off into those far recesses of his mind where lonliness was his constant companion. "I can't explain it, I know it sounds stupid since I only met her today but she makes me feel good about myself - maybe because she _is_ a stranger and sometimes you can open up more." It took him a few seconds to realise it was what she had said several hours before.

Dan smirked. "I just wanted to know you're OK, Jack, I didn't need an essay."

"Oral report," Jack corrected, heading out the door. "Essays are written."

Dan poked his head out. Bloody intellectual. "Whatever," he said, laughing.

... Jack returned a few minutes later and placed a box of condoms on his bedside table. "Sorry about that," he murmered apologetically. "I know it was irresponsible but I didn't bother stocking up since I moved in."

He was already on top of her again. His brief chat with Dan had fortified him, and he started kissing her with renewed enthusiasm. But his words struck her and distracted her. "Jack, you're safe, aren't you?"

"I'm a surgeon, I have to be." It was a good enough answer; Jack didn't feel the need to explain that being treated for latent syphilis when you were sixteen was a humiliating experience that he didn't want to go through again. It had shocked him over the years how many women there were who were not only willing to take the risk, but hurt that he wasn't. Didn't these people know the game of Russian Roulette they were playing?

"But you just said you were irresponsible..."

He finally stopped kissing her and propped himself on on his elbows so he could look down at her and meet her eyes. It was irritating, but he kind of liked the fact she wanted answers from him about his sexual history. "I meant it was irresponsible to put myself in a position like this where I need them and don't have them. It's an easy temptation to give into so I try to avoid it all together. I was lucky Dan was here and I'm pissed off I didn't think of it sooner. That's all I meant. I'm sorry if I gave you the impression I'm reckless about safe sex, because I'm not." He rolled onto his back. "Look, I won't hold it against you if you want to leave. I've really put my foot in it, haven't I?"

She lay on one side so she could look at him. It was hard to read him but she knew he was telling the truth. "I don't think it's something we talk about enough," she said. "Not us specifically but people in general. Maybe it's not the most fun thing to talk about it, but I think it's cool that you're so aware of it." She was rewarded with a smile and it struck her how much it changed his features when he smiled. She leaned down to kiss him.

He responded eagerly, glad to be off the previous subject. The odd honesty of their conversation had given her a new respect for him and with that respect came a greater desire. Boldly she climbed on top of him and he responded by running his hands all the way down her back, from her shoulders down to her ass and thighs. She groaned as he started running his hands up and down that section of her body. He took that as permission to slide his hands down further to the hem of her skirt and then up the inside of her legs. "Jack," she gasped, all nervousness and apprehension evaporated. She started unbutonning his shirt, getting frustrated in her efforts until he had to help her before she tore a button. She ran her hands down his bare chest and he bucked against her until he had to cry out, "Oh, God, stop or I'm going to lose control."

She grinned. There was something very empowering about having a man like Jack, who must have been with dozens of women more sophisticated and experienced than her, on the brink of completely losing it and she wondered what it would take to push him over the edge - and what it would be like to be with a man like Jack, having been pushed over the edge. She shivered in anticipation. While he complained about losing control, she doubted he was ever _not_ in control in the bedroom. "So what if I do this?" she asked cheekily, and started kissing his chest, working her way down until she was unbuckling his belt. It was no longer about just losing control; it was about mutual enjoyment, about getting almost as much pleasure out of getting him off as he was... and knowing instinctively that Jack was the kind of man who always repaid a favour.

"You don't have to," he said weakly when he realised what she was going to do. He could never quite forget the humiliation of being made to do it himself; his weak offer of reprieve against an act he'd found disgusting was more a need to know it was entirely voluntary than an actual dislike of having it done _to_ him.

Gabrielle smiled, not understanding the dark history that came from Jack's additude to blow jobs; he just assumed he didn't want to corce a woman into doing it (which was a big part of it, just not for reasons she understood). "It's OK, I want to," she reassured him, and proceeded to give the best blowjob he'd ever recieved. It wasn't just that she managed to take him all the way in, which was treat enough given most women considered him too big to take all the way in, but she knew how to touch him in other ways... he groaned and bucked against her when she did something _really_ stimulating with her tongue.

If he was in a state of mind to think about it, he would have wondered _why_ she was so good at it, given she was so awkward and inexperienced about touching. But that required thinking, and that required bloodflow and she had a knack for pulling it all in the one direction... he bit down on his lip hard enough to make it bleed so he wouldn't scream when he climaxed. Dan wouldn't appreciate it.

If he could have credited her with any degree of sexual manipulation, he would have thought her an exceedingly clever girl. Rather than lose control, he had gone the opposite way and knew he was spent enough to spend at least the next hour on her before he wanted it again. He took her in his arms and kissed the top of her head. No way would he be up for even the most lazy caressing for at least a few minutes. "Haven't wanted to scream before," he said, which was kind of the truth, he'd never wanted to scream in pleasure before at least. "Do I want to know where you learnt that?"

"Depends, how jealous do you get?"

Jack laughed. "So long as I know you weren't thinking of anyone else..."

"Nope, just you." She leaned in to kiss him and he turned his head away.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, hating himself for this stupid hangup and breaking the mood. "It's just I hate the taste. I mean, I really hate it. It's made me throw up every single time. You think you're offended now, wait until I'm puking my guts out."

"Where's the bathroom?" she asked. Jack gave her directions. She came back a few minutes later, having so thoroughly rinsed her mouth out with Listerine (he wondered if she'd emptied the bottle) that he almost preferred that she _hadn't_ done it but kissed her obligingly. "You're sweet," he said.

"I've had worst asked of me," she said. There was enough bitterness in her voice to make him cup her chin and force her to look at him.

"I swear to God that's the worst I will ever ask you and I have for reasons for doing it," he said with such dignity and sincerity that she shivered. She had no doubt that he was telling the truth, but more than that... it was the way he said 'I will ever ask of you'... like maybe there was something more to come. Then he grinned at her. "Anyway, I believe I ow you a favour." Just like she thought he would.

He meaneuvered her so she was on her back and started kissing her in much the same way she'd been kissing him, working his way down, undoing her top as he went. He deftly unclipped her bra and started kissing and fondling her breasts. She sighed with delight.

But the best was to come. He worked his way down, unzipping and pulling down her skirt with ease, kissing and caressing her thighs and across her abdomen and thighs, getting off on hearing her whimper and moan. Instinct told him she'd never had an orgasm before and he wanted to go easy on her...

... Gabrielle almost climaxed there and then when Jack pulled down her panties and started using his tongue on her. She'd had guys go down on her before, but always feeling like an obligation, something they had to do so they wouldn't appear _completely_ selfish... she started to moan as Jack applied pressure in the right spots. He'd been right in guessing she'd never climaxed before and she felt giddy for the unfamiliar - but highly pleasurable - sensations that were flooding her body. She was grateful for the steadying hand Jac held over her abdomen, because she was thrashing violent in response to his ministratoins. She reached for the pillow and held it over her face so she could muffle her screams as she climaxed.

She was still shaking when, a few seconds later, he was beside her, reaching for a condom. "Thankyou," she said.

Jack resisted the urge to frown. He found it vaugely insulting that he should be held in such high regard for making a woman climx, like it was _hard_ - just so long as you weren't abjectly selfish about your pleasure at the expense of your partners - which Jack supposed was the problem with so many men. But that wasn't Gabrielle's fault so he didn't say anything, kissing her instead (and feeling a bit guilty, like he always did, that she didn't have the same issues with it that he did) and got the condom on, moving so he was on top of her, penetrating her slowly, watching her face carefully for any discomfort. There was none. He pushed inside her so he was buried in her then started pumping her, slowly at first, then faster as they both got into it, stroking her as he went, bringing her to orgasm again, silencing her by kissing her deeply. She wrapped her arms around his neck, digging her nails into his back, and her legs around his waist, wrapping them even tighter as she climaxed until he worried for a second he was going to lose circulation.

Afterwards, he was reluctant to pull out of her but had to or risk the condom slipping. Lying on his back, he pulled her into his arms and felt like he couldn't hold her tight enough. "That was amazing," he murmered. He didn't know what it was about her, maybe it was just the fact he could talk to her so easily and that emotional intimacy bled into the bedroom.

Gabrielle snuggled into him. She felt shaken and elated. She could never in her wildest dreams have imagined sex could be that good. Better than it had been, but not this good. She told herself not to read too much into it, that Jack had been honest about what he wanted from her and had more than delivered on that, but still... "I didn't think it would be that good," she couldn't help but admit in that same shy voice that he found so endearing.

He kissed the top of her head and stroked her back idly. "Yeah?" he asked. She nodded her head against his chest. "I - look, I know this is going to sound stupid but you've done me a huge favour. I felt really screwed up after Deanna, questioned myself so much. You've made me feel a lot better about myself."

She tilted her head so she could meet his eyes and was surprised to find he was serious. Why the hell would someone like Jack ever questoin himself? Especially when he must know how good he was in bed. "Glad I could help," she quipped.

They spent the next two hours talking about everything under the sun - movies, music, politics, medicine, even philosophy. He was delighted to discover how informed she was and found himself wondering if there could be more to this than just a one-nighter.

They had sex another two times that night before falling asleep together. He woke up with her in his arms and smiled at the memory of the previous night. he was feeling horny and he couldn't believe the effect she had on him.

She stirred when she felt his hands roaming across her body, touching her in places that would have her writhing in a few minutes... she gasped when she focused on the numbers on the clock on his bedside table. She was meant to be at her bew job in an hour.

"Jack, stop," he admonished him without much conviction, pushing his hands away weakly when what she actually wanted to do was let him have her again... and again... and again. He'd awoken a desire in her which had been dormant despite having been sexually active - well, that was a relative term - for ten years. "I have to be at a new job in an hour."

He nibbled on her ear. She was no match for him, either in strength or determination. "I dare you to tell them you were too busy having sex with your boyfriend to notice the time," he said.

"Sorry?" She wasn't _that_ sleepy and distracted that she didn't notice his slip.

He grinned ruefully. "Freudian slip." Enough of a slip to ruin the moment which, realistically, was a good thing. He didn't want to get her into trouble. Not before he even got to take her out on a date. "Can you, ah, give me your number? I want to call you and, uh, take you out to dinner, if you'd like." He was surprised at how nervous he felt making the request. He'd asked out women hundreds of times before, and asking them out _after_ a fantastic night in the sake was a no-brainer, but somehow, Gabrielle was different.

She smiled at him that endearing, shy smile. "Really?" she asked.

"I haven't lied about anything else so far, have I?" he countered, and she had to concede he was right. She recited her number and he put it in his phone, making sure he had it down correctly before reluctantly letting her go. He offered to walk her to the door but she refused so instead he watched her leave, waiting until she had shut the door before her before nestling back down in the sheets and drifting off to sleep (he hadn't exactly slept much last night; he felt a little guilty for keeping Gabrielle up when she'd already told him she had an early start the next day) and dreaming about the incredible woman he'd met who made him laugh, made him feel good about himself as a person and amazing in bed.

It wasn't until Dan called him later that day that he realised he hadn't remembered to ask _where_ it was she was starting her new job.


	2. Chapter 2

_Hey guys! Sorry for any inconsistancies - I'm writing this on the fly!_

"I'm Gabrielle Jaeger and I'm so sorry I'm late." So Gabrielle said as she half-walked, half-ran into the Emergency Department of All Saints Western General, already half an hour late. She felt thoroughly unprepared and cursed herself for not setting an alarm or something last night. She had been too busy being with Jack to think about anything else but her new lover.

She couldn't help but smile at that. _Her new lover_. She had good instincts about people, and her instincts told her Jack meant what he said about wanting to call her and take her out. She had the girlish urge to check her phone every five minutes to see if he'd called or messaged, even though she knew it was likely he'd gone back to bed. She'd given him good reason to be sleeping right now.

Doctor Frank Campion, head of the ED, looked at his new Nursing Unit Manager suspciously. She was younger than the last two - well, the last two that _counted_, since he'd neither liked Deanna or thought Dan was up for the job permanantly - and there was something about her that made him think she'd be a lot harder to keep in line than Terri or Nelson. And now she had a doe-eyed expression on her face, like an infatuated teenager. He wondered who it was and how long it would last. Relationships rarely hacked the stress of working in the ED, even with the business hours the NUM worked.

Frank started barking out orders, which Gabrielle took with good grace. She'd been intrigued by this position, the fact it went empty week after week despite being a plum job in a good hospital in a major city. She had signed up for the oppurtunity to do something different with her life. Frank, she could see, was going to be a handful, but he was a fool if he thought he could get her to march to his beat. He was no worse a bully than her two older brothers, and she knew how to handle them just fine. You buttered them up, made them think they were intelligent and came up with all the great ideas, then when it was established you were actually intellgenct with a lot of great ideas - none of which you were sharing until you got some credit - well, credit started to flow pretty quickly after that.

Like her initial experience with the oldest nurse in the ward and one of the oldest in the hospital, the legendary. Yvonne 'Von' Ryan. She was sick of never being able to follow up on her patients, it was like an assembly line, working in an ED - you patch them up, you send them on their way, you patch more up, you send them on their way. She wanted to monitor _after_ their emergency treatment was over, until they recovered fully.

Gabrielle had immediately come up with the idea of creating a Patient Liason Officer who's job description would be such; to monitor patients _after_ they had left the hospital, to liase with community welfare agencies like DoCS, Meals on Wheels and nursing agencies.

Great idea, Von had said, enthusiastic and acidic at the same time. "Try running it past Frank."

Of course, Gabrielle knew Frank would shoot down any idea that came from _her_, the newbie, even though she was automatically senior to all the nurses in the ED and technically not a subordinate to any of the doctors, either, not even Frank. But men like Frank Campion didn't take suggestions from many people, let alone newbies, but Gabrielle had a plan. She waited until a situation came up which could really have been helped by having a PLO and said distracted, "And I was just saying to Von she'd make a great Pation Liason Officer. Oh well, just a thought."

By the end of the day, Frank was in their office. "I had a great idea, let's make Von Patient Liason Officer. I'll even do the paperwork and lobby for funding." And off he went, pleased with himself for coming up with such a great idea which killed two fish with one stone; the fact they really could do with a PLO and the fact Von, by far the most experienced nursing he had come across despite only be an EN, had been making noises lately about how unfurfilling she found her job. She was someone he wanted to hold onto.

Of course, Gabrielle had no intention of letting Frank take credit for her ideas _all_ the time... just until she had established herself as someone who had a lot to offer.

She found herself thinking of Jack after she had accomplish that little power play. He struck her as having strong feminist values, or at least he understood how difficult a NUM's jobcould be. That Deanna witch may have done a real number on him, but he had taken the time to understand her job and appreciate that it coudl be hard - the nurses were _always_ wanting things from you and never appreciating what they got and the doctors were always especting miracle and talking down to you. She was sure Jack would applaud her for walking the fine line between the two.

She worked through her list of nurses, interviewing each informally to get what made them all tick and what they wanted our of their jobs. Near the top was the newest, Erica Templeton, a sweet, pretty younger woman full of enthusiasm and very chatty and friendly. "You're heaps nicer than the cow we had in before," she said.

Gabrielle frowned in confusion. "I was under the impression I was following two men into this position," she said.

"You are. But the woman before them was a complete bitch. I worked with Deanna here and at St. Angela's and..." Ricki made a face. "A good friend of mine lives with the surgeon she was dating at the time and Jack just didn't deserve what she put him through."

Gabrielle felt her heart stop in her chest. Deanna, Jack. Was this happening? She scrolled down her list of nurses until she found what she thought she was looking for: Daniel Goldman. _You've got to be kidding me_. "You can go, Ricki, could you tell Daniel Goldman I want to speak to him when you see him?"

"Sure," Ricki agreed, wondering if she had said or done something to make Gabrielle suddenly seem colder. She hoped not, because Gabrielle seemed like she was going to be a much better boss than Deanna had been. She made a face at the memory.

"You look like you've beensucking on lemons," Dan joked as he passed her.

Ricki stuck her tongue out at him. "Was just talking to the new NUM and she made me think of Deanna. She wants to speak to you, by the way. Her name's Gabrielle Jaeger."

The name sounded familiar to Dan - probably one of those legendary battleaxes who's names everyone knew from hospital to hospital. God knew they needed one to go toe-to-toe with Frank. So he was shocked to see the pretty blond that Jack had brought over the night before - shocked and dismayed, because he'd sensed Jack was capable of falling for this woman, maybe he already was, and the fact she worked here complicated things, and definitely in a bad way.

"What are you doing?" Gabrielle asked when the first thing on laying eyes on her Dan did was get out his mobile and started texting someone.

"Letting Jack know_ you're _the new NUM," Dan said.

"Why?"

"Because he's a trauma surgeon, he's in and out of the ED all day. The last thing either of you needs is to have him show up, see you and give away what happened between you because he didn't have a heads-up."

There was something in the way he said those words that made Gabrielle feel dirty. "And why would that be a bad thing?" she asked, resenting that she had to have this conversation, let alone with an insubordiate. Everything wonderful about last night seemed to dissolve under the knowing gaze of a younger subordinate.

Dan met her eyes. He felt awful for having to do this, but knew if he didn't, and Jack showed up and gave them away, any options they may have had would be blown to pieces. "How much did Jack tell you about himself last night?" he asked. "i mean, about his romantic history, about his reputation?"

"That he had lousy judgement when it came to women and that his reputation was pretty bad at the moment," she said, neither of which had seemed all that bad at the time. After all, he had been honest about it, hadn't he?

"That's about the size of it, no matter what you hear. And you're going to hear some ugly things about Jack within a few days. He's dated two of your predecessors, both of them ended very ugly and very publicly, as soon as we heard we were getting a female in the jokes started - and some of them were beyond tasteless." So much so that no way was Dan going to repeat them, especially given some of them hadn't been that far off the mark. "The second people know about you and him, you're reputation will be attached to his. You have the right to find out for yourself what people are saying about him and decide what you want to do before Jack says something inadvertantly out of surprise and you don't get that option."

Gabrielle leaned back in her chair, resenting that her life was being organised by two men she barely knew. Well, Jack she knew intimately, more intimately than she wished now...

Her phone went off. _Not working until Thursday. _Today was Tuesday. She didn't know Jack had lied and was planning to call in sick to give her the space she needed. _I suggest you be discreet in learning what you can. Let me know when you're willing to meet me. _It was abrupt, and she tried not to take it personally - after all, that's how text messages were.

"Look, thanks for doing the right thing," she said. Suddenly, she wanted Dan out of her office. She needed time to think and Dan's presence was stifling.

When Dan left, she stared at the wall for a few minutes. She couldn't believe how things had turned out. She had started to fall for a guy who had a terrible reputation. It was one thing to _know_ he had a past, another to be confronted by it on her first day of starting. If this was what she had found out in her first few hours, what else was there?

Plenty, she discovered. On her way to lunch she was met up with a stunning woman who introduced herself as Jillian Henderson, the head of Oncology. She seemed young to be a HoD - mid-thirties - and after a few minutes of talking to her, Gabrielle discovered why. She was very smart and very ambitious - ruthlessly so, Gabrielle sensed.

And she was eager to spill the gossip about who were the guys to avoid, rattling off a few names before she got to what Gabrielle sensed was her _real_ reason to tracking down the ED's new NUM; Jack Quade. "He's been involved with two of your predecessors," she said knowingly. "One of them used to be a nun and he managed to get her friend pregnant too. Who used to be a lesbian."

Oh, this was just getting better and better. Gabrielle wondered how much of it was true - surely stories like that didn't just spontaneously appear on the gossip vine, there had to be _some_ truth to it?

Jillian, she gathered, had dated Jack briefly but dumped him when she got tired of his arrogance, his selishness in bed, , his kinky demands. She wouldn't go into any details, just looked extremely pained that a woman of her intelligence and professional status should be demeaned by even _asked_. Which Gabrielle found extremely odd since Jack had been nothing but honest and considerate. She wondered how much of it was Jillian having an axe to grind over something - but if she had left him, then what, because dumpers tend to be far more gracious than dumpees - and how much of it, God forbid, was true. Jack had been honest enough about the fact he'd made some impressive screwups with women in the past.

It got worse. When she went to Cougars for a drink to try and make sense of what she'd been told by Jillian, along with what she'd been told by the three other women who felt the obligation to inform Gabrielle, who currently held the position previously held by both Terri Sullivan (former nun) and Deanna Richardson, that Jack Quade would soon enough be sniffing around her and to steer well clear, it turned out Cougars was the watering ground for the hospital staff. Naturally, it was just across the road. But if anyone had seen her and Jack together last night -

She bought herself a beer and sat in a corner where she could drink unobtrusively. The last thing she wanted to do was be joined by one of her new ED colleagues, or worse, by someone else determined to fill her in about Jack.

Ten minutes in, and she would have liked the company, when she overheard the conversation from a few tables away. It was a slow night - Tuesdays always were, she was told, there was a few good shows on television - and they didn't trouble themselves to keep it down. "I overheard Dan telling Erica he had someone over last night," one girl (who Gabrielle dubbed Fran because she had a nasal voice that made Fran Drescher's sound modulated) said to her companions, and she knew immediately what the subject of gossip was. Her blood ran cold. Instinct told her to trust Dan, gossip though he might be, once he had figured out the truth, but what if he had said something before he'd shown up for his shift that day?

"Bet he's changed hunting grounds, notice no-one sees him around Cogars anymore?" asked girl number two, and Gabrielle breathed a sigh of relief. So far as these girls knew - and they seemed the type to keep up with gossip - no-one had seen her and Jack together last night. "His act is too well known around here. I mean, who wants to be with someone who's had half the hospital? I wouldn't sleep with him if he _begged _me." That was followed by bitchy laughing. Gabrielle started to finish her drink quickly so she could leave. She was too upset to hear the desperation in girl number two's voice, that it would take a lot less than begging for her to sleep with him.

"Deanna Richardson told me she dumped him after he tried to force her into a threesome," girl number three said, not to be outdone in repeating malicious rumour.

"Really? I heard it was because she caught him with another guy," Fran said, and Gabrielle assumed Fran was the ringleader in this little bitchfest. There was more bitchy laughter, and Gabrielle left them to it a few minutes later, absolutely mortified. She went to bed feel confused, mortified, angry - and wondering how much truth there was to the gossip.

* * *

The next day, she scrounged up the courage to talk to Charlotte Beaumont. Charlotte was the lesbian in the nun-and-lesbian, and realising that story was one hundred perecent true made her wonder how much of the rest of it was completely true. She blushed with mortification every time she thought of it. Oh, God, what if she had gone to bed with a guy like that? What if she had started falling for him? You never could tell.

See, this is why she should have listened to her mother about not sleeping with men before she got to know them. Preferably not before she was married to them.

Charlotte was a friendly, intelligent woman, and Gabrielle knew from the begining she was going to like her. If nothing else, the woman was upfront. "I figured you'd be looking for gossip soon enough," she said. Given Jack's fondness for dating them, an attractive NUM from the ED was always going to generate talk, and on top of the fact that Jack had apparantly scored the night before last - he had always been an easy target for gossip but now things were bordering on ridiculous. "I want to make it clear, though, that I'm not going to pass on gossip, and I'm not going to repeat anything he's told me as a friend. So I don't know what it is you hope to get out of me."

There was a quiet dignity to Charlotte's words that made Gabrielle think maybe she should have come to Charlotte first - she clearly had far more integrity than anyone else. And there was something in Gabrielle's face that made Charlotte regret being so harash with her. It was obvious Gabrielle wasn't looking for gossip; she had been warned, by some with good, if misguided intentions, as well as a few malicious gossips and a few exes out for revenge for being dumped (Doctor Henderson, I am looking at you), that Jack was a man she wanted to avoid at any cost, and a man who was inclined to pursue her at any cost. Combine that with the fact Deanna had had a field day when they'd broken up making up stories (Charlotte wondered if there was a website for making up lies about your ex, because no way was the woman original enough to come up with them herself) and she couldn't blame Gabrielle for being a little concerned; she must think she had a perverted womaniser and stalker on her hands.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's just when his ex left, she made up crap about him - I overheard her one day and confronted her and she just laughed this... mean laugh like she was one of those high school bitches. She held court in Cougars for about a fortnight telling anyone who listened until Vincent - if you're not up with the gossip, Vincent is my ex husband, he's also Jack's boss and friend - threatened to break her neck." Charlotte laughed at the memory of Vincent descibing it. Deanna was fundamentally a coward, hence the way she went about things, and like any coward, she didn't respond bravely to the threat of violence. Especially when Vincent was in one of his moods and looked very capable of going through with it. "It's true he didn't have the best relationship to begin with, and it's true he's demonstrated some pretty lousy judgement... but I have never known him to be anything but considerate and attentive. When I hear the talk that's still going around about him, I want to smack people."

"So he's never - I mean, he doesn't play around and he wouldn't... force someone to do something."

"The closest I've known him to forcing an issue is when he was pursuing my best friend at the time. But that was being persistant, not forceful, and he's changed." She thought for a moment how much of Jack's arrogance had been knocked out of him by her miscarriage. Poor guy. He really needed a decent woman to love him. "Sometimes I wish I could break Deanna's neck myself. He was really falling for her, and she humiliated him doubly, in front of all his colleagues and by making him question if anything in their relationship was real."

It was what Jack had said. Suddenly all the details added up. Forget all the gossip she had heard, the only stories that more or less corrolated were Jack's, Dan's and Charlotte's. She wondered what kind of woman Deanna was to set out to destroy a man who had been in love with her, who had tried to support her... "I can't believe I doubted him," she said softly to herself, making Charlotte realise the conversation had a far more personal tone than she had first thought.

"I'm sorry? I was under the impression you and Jack hadn't actually met you." Gabrielle squirmed. "OK, you may as well spill, because I have to work with you, and I don't appreciate you beating around the bush. Has he shown an interest in you? Are you trying hedge your bets and see if he's worth dating before you say yes or no?"

Charlotte looked angry about Gabrielle not being upfront with her, but more than that, Gabrielle gopt the feeling Charlotte could be a good ally - and a good source of advice. "I met him Monday night," she admitted. "We just talked for hours over drinks, I only got here a few days before and I wanted some company, I didn't expect things to go as far as they did but we really connected and he was honest about his past and what he wanted from me... afterwards it was just _so good_ and I was so happy that he wanted my number... then I got here and I saw Dan and put everything together and ever since everyone's felt like they have to tell me what a usre of women he is."

Charlotte looked at her sympathetically - sympathy for her and Jack both. Gabrielle seemed nicer, a huge improvement on Deanna (who Charlotte had had a bad feeling about from day one) and it wasn't a fair situation on either of them. "What's Jack said?" she asked.

"He wants me to find out what's been said about him and decide what I want to do. Charlotte, what am I supposed to do? I really like him and I get that all this stuff that's being said about him isn't true and it isn't fair but... if I get involved with him, I'll become known as his latest conquest and I can't have that happen to my reputation, not when I'm so new here."

Chatlotte sighed. It was an unfair situation for both of them, and it was a crap sitaution for her, too. "You either have to pretend it never happened and never give any hint to it, or... enough people remember how devoted Jack was to Terri. If he can commit to a public relationship for at least a few months I think that will be enough to avoid the conquest label."

_Girlfriend, whore... or nobody_, Gabrielle thought. Some choice.

* * *

She met Jack that evening in a bar he knew of which was miles from anywhere - they both wanted to avoid being seen together at Cougars. He was already waiting for her when she got there, toying with his drink. "Hi," she said nervously.

He smiled at her tentatively. "Hi," he said. God, she was beautiful, even though she was still in her uniform. It wasn't even her physical appearance, it was how good he had felt around her... He frowned. A fantastic night with a fantastic woman to be followed by the realisation that her reputation would be rubbish if it ever became known she was his latest... latest what? Latest lay, latest conquest? He couldn't think in terms like that, not when he was so eager to see more of her. "It looks like we have a problem," he said.

"Yeah." She ordered a vodka and orange juice and downed it quickly.

"You're aware of my reputation?"

"Far more than I wanted to be." Jack flinched. "If it's worth anything... I get that none of it's true. Charlotte had nothing but glowing things to say about you."

So Charlotte knew. Jack decided to pass over that. "But you're still worried about your reputation."

Gabrielle nodded. "Jack, I really like you and I had a great time with you and I really wanted to see you again, but - "

"Look, you don't have to sugarcoat it. I get it. It's OK. I'm not holding it against you because you don't want to be seen with me."

"Jack... Charlotte said - Charlotte said she thought - if you were willing to commit to a public relationship for a few months - well, if people got used to the idea of us together and not just me as your latest conquest... they'd get over it. If you could make that kind of commitment, if you could promise me you wouldn't get bored of me if a few weeks..." she trailled off, knowing even before she'd said it how unreasonable it was to ask that of anyone.

"You know I can't make that kind of promise," Jack said quietly. "I hardly know you, I have no idea how I'm going to feel about you in a few weeks."

It was only what she had expected to hear from him, but it still pained her to hear it. "I guess I should get going then," she said. There was no point in prolonging her departure. "How much do I owe you for the drink?"

He waved her away. "Don't worry about it," he said. "Just... be really careful about how you are around me, OK?" She was touched by the concern in his voice even after she'd turned him down.

He watched her go. He couldn't blame her for not wanting to get involved with him, but he was surprised at how much it hurt. It wasn't fair that he should like her so much and have things fall apart because of goddamn Deanna Richardson.

_You can't blame her entirely_, he reminded himself. _You got Charlotte pregnant all on your own._

_I was twenty-four and barely a resident, _he argued with himself. _I was heartbroken over Terri and drunk and I paid a high enough price when she miscarried, I shouldn't have to keep having people talk about it like it meant nothing to me. _How come no-one cared he had beeth devoted and faithful to Deanna? How come no-one cared how careful he was about safe sex all but that one time? Why did people keep talking about him like there weren't bigger jerks then him in the hospital? It wasn't fair.

As he watched her go and resisted the urge to run after her and promise whatever he needed to promise to make her stay - before anything, he had promised her honesty, and he knew he couldn't see far enough into the future to make that kind of commitment - he was surprised at how angry he was at the situation, and how much it hurt to let her slip out of his life.


	3. Chapter 3

_Thanks for the feedback! I apologise for any typos or spelling mistakes, I couldn't work out how to set the spell check to English and it was driving me batty when it was set to Polish ('hospital' is a real word, just not in Polish!). Hope you enjoy and remember, feedback makes Scarlett write faster :)_

"Charlotte, do you know if Jack can actually read that book or does he just pretend to to get laid?"

Next to him, Bart snickered. He had wondered the same thing himself.

Charlotte took a peak into the tearoom, where Jack was so engrossed in his book, she doubted if he would have heard his beeper go off. Vincent had grumbled many times about the fact Jack could get so lost in a book that Vincent had to physically locate him rather than beeping him - which somewhat defeated the purpose of having him on call. She could tell from several meters away by the size of the book that he was reading _War and Peace_. "Yeah, he can read it. He used to read it to Tara. Said it was good to keep up with his oral Russian 'cos mostly he just reads it. That, or he was just making up sounds. Sometimes I didn't know with him."

"Who the hell is Tara?"

Dan snickered and Charlotte smiled at the reaction. "Told you you'd know exactly who Tara was within a few weeks," she said.

"I made the mistake of pointing out his daughter's initials would have been TB. He gave me this filthy look, I was scared he was going to hit me. I decided it was best just to accept he was going to call a featus Tara for the rest of his life."

Charlotte was laughing now, and Gabrielle was slow to catch onto what they were talking about. Bart and Sean had no idea. "Sorry," she said. "But Jack has always referred to our baby by the name we chose - actually, the name he decided on after I told him no way were we calling her Scarlett. Thought referring to her as 'It' was inhumane. It's kind of weird at first but it worked for him and who is anyone to judge him for it? Never got where he came up with the name, though. He doesn't have a relative by that name."

"It's the plantation in _Gone With the Wind_," Gabrielle supplied. It had been a month now since they had agreed to act like nothing had ever happened between them and it was proving harder than she'd thought. For starters, Jack was always around. As a trauma surgeon, it was expected her spent a lot of time in the ED, but he actually preferred to company of the ED doctors and nurses so spent a lot of the down-time that he had to spend in the hospital here. He was popular, and when he was reading, he was often socialising with people.

Nights at Cougars were the worst. That was when he became really sociable - well, as sociable as Jack got. Cate and Charlotte both had knacks for bringing out his friendlier side, and her heart cried out whenever she saw him smile... and wrenched whenever he touched one of them. It was stupid things like a steadying hand on the back or a hug goodbye but it brought out the green-eyed monster in her.

She knew she had no right to be jealous. She had made her choice and she stood by it. That's what she told herself. But it was so much harder to see him every day and remember how good it had been in his arms - not just the sex, but the way he'd held her afterwarrds...

"I don't understand why a guy finds a book about a woman so appealing," Sean scoffed. "Seems so... unmanly."

"He relates to Scarlett," Gabrielle said without thinking. Now she had to explain how she knew that. "It's one of my favorite books, too, and I was talking to him about it. Even tried reading his copy but it looks like it's been through the wars. It's a current edition, too."

Dan smirked. "That's because, among other things, he spent a day bending the spine back - something about you can tell how loved a book is by its spine. And he's been using it as a coaster since he bought it."

"That's just...odd," Bart said, who hadn't read a piece of fiction since this excrutiatingly boring selection in English Literature. (Bryce Courtenay once said that said selection was probably the reason most adults don't pick up another book after high school.) But Gabrielle didn't find it odd, she found it quite endearing. She got there was something a little sad about a brand-new book, like the owner didn't find it interesting enough to dog-ear pages and bend the spine back so they could read it with one hand while carrying the shopping...

"I think it's sweet," she said boldly, momentarily not caring that she was supposed to be aware of everything she did and said regarding Jack. "There's too many people in this industry who don't read anything more than medical journals." _That_ took both Sean and Bart down a peg or two.

"That was not a clever idea," Charlotte said a minute later as they walked together towards the office Gabrielle shared with Frank.

"What? I'm sick of people thinking just because you enjoy reading, you must be a geek. My ex was like that."

"You mean Steve?"

"Jack told you about that?"

"He mentions a lot of things. Does that bother you?"

No, it didn't, Gabrielle realised. She was perfectly comfortable with Jack talking about it. In fact, it made her feel... remembered. "Has he said how he took it?" she asked, even though she knew the answer.

"You know I wouldn't tell you if I knew." Then Charlotte saw something akin to regret in Gabrielle's face and she added, "but for what it's worth, the boy feels long and deeply. Some things he never gets over. Like Tara."

She couldn't tell Gabrielle that Jack had feel in a foul mood ever since Gabrielle had made the choice not to get involved with him. He got why she made the choice but it still hurt. And he had struggled with his feelings for her ever since. He wanted to be with her but wanted to respect her choice not to be with him more.

She couldn't tell her that Jack was deeply lonely and his eyes followed Gabrielle whenever she was around. She couldn't explain that it went deeper than lonliness - he had been infatuated with Terri, too, and he hadn't followed her with his eyes when she was around.

She couldn't tell Gabrielle that Jack wouldn't shake the feeling of being in love with her even while he was trying to respect that she had said no.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle was mulling over Charlotte's statement. In their night together, Jack had spoken about Tara - he had never mentioned her by name, but talked enough for her to get the sense that he had taken Charlotte's miscarriage very badly. That he had named her Tara seemed appropriate. Not only that Jack had seen fit to give her a name but that he had given her a name from a book that he loved so much...

Jack was a man who loved deeply and longly. She wondered if she had done the wrong thing by him, turning him down. Every snippet she overheard from Dan, everything Charlotte told her - when she wasn't busy gaurding confidences - said he had so much love, so much honesty, so much integrity.

And she had turned him down because she was scared of her reputation.

She tried not to regret it. She tried not to tell herself she had been cowardly But it could be so hard sometimes. Especially when she caught a glimpse of him with Charlotte or Cate, or busy reading, and she knew what intelligence and integrity was wrapped around him.

* * *

"I swear I see you with a novel in your hand so often it's hard to see you with a magazine," Gabrielle half-heartedly joked a week later.

Jack didn't look up. He was afraid if he looked up he would catch how beautiful she was and do something he regretted. "It's a German medical journal," he said abruptly. If he wasn't abrupt, his voice might betray everything he felt.

The stupid thing was, he knew he shouldn't be spending so much time here. This was her turf - he wouldn't like it if she started showing up randomly in the surgeon's lounge.

But he had friends here, he told himseld. And the fact he got to see Gabrielle as much as he wanted...

He hated being able to see her but not touch her. Everytime he saw her, he wanted to take her into his arms and... he gritted his teeth. She had made her feelings clear, and he couldn't blame her.

But everytime he saw Sean or Bart be the least bit pally with her, he wanted to smack them. He wante dto stake his turf, as childish as it was. God, he'd thought he'd been immature getting Charlotte pregnant? Trying to way he felt seeing Gabrielle with anyone else.

Gabrielle was too busy looking for a clean glass for water to notice the way Jack suddenly gripped the edges of his journal with impotant anger at the situation.

Suddenly she screamed out, and he forgot all about his novel. Someone - probably one of the temps they had coming in and out - had broken a glass and, rather than just own up to it, shoved it back into the cupboard and made it someone else's problem. She withdrw her hand from the cupboard, a ragged circle of blood slicing through the palm of her hand.

Forgetting completely about how much he wanted to be with her, Jack was immediately at her side, chest against her back, doctor's instinct to pull her towards the sink, opening her hand out - she cried out at that, and his heart hurt to hear it, but he knew what needed to be done - turning the cold water on until the blood ran freely into the sink. "Easy," he said soothingly, both lover and doctor at the same time. "Try to relax. Try to forget about being a nurse and let me take care of it."

It was easy to forget about being a nurse when she knew she had someone as competant and compassionate as Jack looking after her. She wanted to melt into him and let him take care of her like a boyfriend would, but... He prised open the wound as gently as he could, and shuddered when he felt her flinch again him. Her chest was against his back and he could feel every movement in her body. He hated causing her any pain, even if it was for her own good.

"Wound's clean," he said gruffling. "Want to get you to a bed so I can see it clearly."

He led her to an empty cubicle, yelling to Frank as he went, "Some idiot left a broken glass in the tearoom cupbaord," in such an incenced way that made her feel cared for, and not strictly doctor-to-patient, either. Without bothering to tell her to get up onto the bed, he hooked his arm around her knees and hoisted her up with the same ease he had that night they had spent together... she blushed and turned her head away.

"Don't tell me you're a nurse that hates the sight of blood," he said, a smile playing on his face.

"Only my own," she admitted, and it was a semi-truth. She didn't admit to the fact Jack was making her feel very flushed.

He was as gentle as he could be, sanitising the wound then bandaging it up. He was aware that she was becoming distressed - she certainly wouldn't be the first doctor or nurse he had come across who was in their element in the middle of amputations and last-stage cancer but hated the sight of their own blood - so he said to her softly, "I want you to close your eyes and concentrate on my voice, farmgirl."

There was something about the way he called her 'farmgirl' that was strangely soothing and not the least bit condecending. She closed her eyes. "So, the closest I ever got to the bush was when my sponsor family in St. Petersburg who bag the Communist party for its complete ineptitude when it came to collective farming so I have no idea what it's like... why don't you tell me?"

There was something interested and patient in her voice that made her prattle about the time, when she was a little girl and first learning to ride a horse, her brother had thought it was incredibly funny to put her on a stallion that had a mind of its own and would, more often than not, ride under a tree branch that was high enough from him but too low for its ride. Or how they used to strap a container full of detergent that would leave a trail of (biodegradable) bright pink froth in its wake so they knew what fields had been plowed. She was just in the middle of a feminist rant about how her father expected his daughter - and granddaughters - to become teachers or nurses when Jack broke on softly and said, "Was done a few minutes ago, farmgirl, you can open your eyes now."

She opened her eyes to find him smiling at hert and her hard bandaged up. She'd barely felt a thing.

"How does he do that?" Bart asked from a few meters away to no-one in particular. He had tried imitating Jack, telling patients to listen to his voice while he administered treatment, with so little luck that he gave up after a few weeks. Of course, he didn't understand that Jack's patience came from the first woman he'd slept with, who saw in him a fear of being touched by anyone - touch was associated with pain, in his mind - and had coaxed him into trusting her. It was a lesson you never forgot, but a lesson Bart was too sheltered to learn.

Frank shrugged. He didn't known and he didn't care. All he knew was that a few minutes ago, Gabrielle had looked ready to hyperventillate and Jack had coaxed her out of it. He strode towards them once he knew Jack had the situation under control and asked in his typical booming voice "everything ok here?"

"Everything is fine, Frank," Jack said, letting go of Gabrielle's hand. He spoke directly to her rather than Frank. "You look a little shaken, I think it's best you take the rest of the day off. You can't do much with one hand out, anyway." And it was her right hand, too.

Gabrielle squirmed. She felt feint but she felt stupid for having reacted like a little girl. "I'm OK," she said half-heartedly.

"Oh, bloody hell, Jaeger, how much good are you going to do your patients looking like you've gone through the wars yourself?" Frank snapped, and Gabrielle, too weak to argue, just blushed. "Go home, and stay home tomorrow, too."

"Yes, Frank," Gabrielle said obediantly, and left within fifteen minutes.

"... What was all that about?" Sean asked Jack ten minutes later. "You seemed pretty cosy." It had been six week since Gabrielle had started, six weeks in which they'd (mostly) taken pains to pretend nothing had happened, and people still remembered that Jack had a soft spot for the ED NUM.

"I'm good at talking patients through their distress, it's a knack I've always had. If you weren't so busy gossiping you would have seen that six months ago," Jack said with enough cool professionalism - something Jack had been practicing a lot since he'd had to work with Gabrielle - that made Sean balk at his words.

He couldn't help but wonder himself how much of it had been his instincts as a doctor and a human being... and his insticnts as a lover and boyfriend... and how much of Gabrielle's response had been as a patient and how much as a lover.

* * *

"Bec, it's good to see you again, it's been a while."

Rebecca Rowe beamed at Charlotte. She was fond of the older woman - she was intelligent and funny and besides, her brother adored her. Charlotte buzzed her in through the triage doors even though technically it was against regulations - only members of staff and patients were allowed through those doors. But enough of the doctors and nurses of the All Saints ED had come to view Rebecca as their own sister that it wasn't considered _that _much of a security breach.

Rebecca bounded through with all the energy of a nineteen-year-old. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if _she_ had had that energy at twenty. she doubted it. Actually, Rebecca made Charlotte think that maybe _Jack _had possessed that kind of energy when he was twenty - there was something about the two of them that, even though they didn't look alike or even have the same name, you knew they were related. She buzzed Jack from surgery and went to tell Rebecca he would be down when he could, but by that point, the younger woman had moved on.

The first person she zoned in on was Erica. Even though Erica was a few years older than her, the two women had hit it off pretty quickly. Rebecca had made an effort to ingratiate herself into Jack's life, a task she didn't find that difficult, given she was highly extroverted and she saw Erica was basically a good person. The two hugged and squealed like old girlfriends - Bart and Sean, having just come across Rebecca for the first time, would have been flabbergasted to learn the two had been friends for less than the time Erica had been working at All Saints.

"How'd your paper go?" Erica asked. Rebecca was studying law. It was hard to tell who was the brightets of the two, her or her brother.

"High distinction," she said pleasedly.

Cate came over. Rebecca was a hard woman to ignore and Cate, like most people, had easily warmed to her. They hugged and the three of them got involved in a pleasant female conversation that Gabrielle was excluded from.

"Who is that?" she asked Sean.

Sean shrugged. "No idea," he admitted. "Wish I did, though." She was gorgeous and vavacious. What man _wouldn't_ want to know her?

Under the pretence of wanting to talk to Erica and Cate, she went over. Before she had a chance to introduce herself, Rebecca looked Gabrielle up and down and said, "You must be Gabrielle."

Cate and Erica weren't surprised. Jack didn't talk much about his professional life to his sister, but she had a knack for cobbling together enough information to know exactly who was new and who they were everytime she came to the ED. Erica herself had come under scrutiny a few months ago, and passed with flying colours because of her intelligence and sincerity.

But of course, Gabrielle didn't know this, nor did Cate or Erica know Rebecca had an axe to grind with her in particular. She gleamed enough information out of Jack to know he had taken Gabrrielle's rejection of him badly. And anyone who made her brother feel bad had a big black mark against them in Rebecca's books. Especially those who made him feel bad because they were too preoccupied with their reputations. Especially those that weren't that good-looking.

Gabrielle retreated under Rebecca's scorn and sense of superiority, having no idea what she had done to offend the younger woman - only knowing she felt about three feet tall.

A few minutes later, Jack came racing through the ED - and he was _racing_, Gabrielle saw with jealousy. Whatever tenderness he had had for her last week was completely gone as he set his sights on this beautiful blond girl named Rebecca. And Gabrielle bet she didn't have to straighten her hair to get it so glossily straight, either.

The beautiful blond girl named Rebecca jumped into his arms the second he was close enough for contact - literally jumped into his arms, Gabrielle saw with disgust, wrapping her legs around his waist. Wasn't she a little bit _young_ for him? She couldn't be older than twenty. "Ooof, get down, you are being entirely inappropriate," Jack complained, not really meaning it. He even wrapped his arms around her waist to support her. "You're acting like you're seven."

"If I were seven, you'd be fourteen," Rebecca quipped. "Would it be more appropriate then?" But she got down anyway. "Dad wants you to come to dinner next Friday."

Jack made a face. He hated being around Rebecca's father. He got that George didn't particularly like having him around, given he represented this whole other life of Carla's - and more than that, Jack represented the married man who, in George's mind, had taken advantage of Carla. Not that Jack minded - having a step-parent who disliked him was hardly something new - but he resented the way George kept trying to play happy families. If George could be a good father to Rebecca and Jack could be a good brother, why should the two have to meet?

"_Please_," she said playfully, and Jack relented. He had difficultly refusing her anything.

"Fine," he said. "But you owe me." She squealed and kissed him on the cheek. They chatted a few more minutes before Jack went back to the surgical lounge and Rebecca went home.

"...That girl has him wrapped around her little finger," Gabrielle overheard Charlotte say, laughing.

"Talk about possessive," Cate agreed. "I wonder how Terri would have fared against her." Everyone knew how devoted Jack had been to the former NUM, but they also knew how devoted he was to his sister, and Rebecca was a harsh judge of the people Jack dated. A woman in her forties - unable to give Jack the children he had craved since Charlotte's miscarriage - who's heart was partially in the grave with her husband was unlikely to muster many points with Rebecca Rowe.

"Deanna was terrified of her," Charlotte confided. "It was hilarious, seeing someone like her living in fear of this slip of a girl who was still in uni." Cate and Erica laughed, both enjoying the image of Deanna being gotten the better of by someone barely out of high school.

Gabrielle turned away. She couldn't listen anymore. what was Rebecca to him? His always-girl? Had Gabrielle just been intended to be his side entertainment, while Rebecca was the main event? Everything in the past two months, all those looks, those touches, how gentle and loverly he had been over her cut hand... had they meant nothing to him? Or had that just been part of his seduction.

Of course, she had no idea the beautiful woman who had thrown herself into Jack's arms was actually his sister. He had mentioned he had a sister, said they didn't have the same father or last name, and if she had been reminded of these details her mind would have recalled them. But as it was, all her heart could think about was a beautiful woman jumping into his arms, playfully teasing him into agreeing to meet her father.

She sought refuge in her office, missing out on the rest of the conversaton. "I think it's sweet, though," Cate said. "I always wanted an older brother myself and you can tell she only does what she does because she wants what's best for him."

"My brother and I used to undermine each other's dates all the time," Erica confided, omitting the fact that AJ was in jail."This one time, AJ just played with him like a cat with a mouse until he was virtually in tears. There was nothing I could do about it but it turned out later he was a drug pusher so maybe AJ was onto something."

"My sister Sophia had this knack of making everyone I dated feel left wanting in compared to Vincent," Charlotte chimed in. "My God, she drove me batty sometimes..."

So the conversation turned to sibling stories and childhood memories while Gabrielle sat at her desk, her heart breaking because she thought every bit of attention Jack had paid her in the last two months had been a lie.

She decided she hated him.

After three days, Jack had had enough of her new and abrupt attitude towards him. He had thought they were getting along great, had thought maybe from the way she had responded to him over the Cut Hand Incident she was rethinking her decision not to get involved with him - then all of a sudden, bam, she was cutting him off in public, questioning his competance as a doctor, requesting other surgeons - any surgeon but him. It had gotten to a point where _other_ NUMs were starting to question having him as a surgical consult - they liked and respected Gabrielle Jaeger, for the most part more than they liked or respected the surgical team as a whole, so if she had a beef with him, should they trust him?

If he had been able to speak to Charlotte about it, Charlotte would have been able to work out the timeline and trace it back to Rebecca's appearance.Their relationship had a way of bringing out that feeling in people. Charlotte didn't dare tell them that because of their physical affection for one another and the fact they looked nothing alike, someone who didn't know their were brother and sister would assume they were a couple. But she did know as far as ingratiating yourself with your partnet's family went, Jack and Rebecca's devotion to each other was obvious, and if Gabrielle had picked up on that without knowing their were brother and sister...

It got to a point that Frank intervened. "Has he done anything to you?" he asked Gabrielle bluntly. "Because if he has, you should make a complaint. Maybe an official warning will be the wake-up call he needs."

But how could you make a complaint over someone because you had willingly gone to bed with them, decided you didn't want to see them anymore then have it turn out they'd actually been seeing someone else for years? So she had told Frank no, she had no issue with Jack, even though Frank could clearly see she was lying.

Bloody Quade, always getting involved with the one woman. A part of him _wanted _Gabrielle to make a complaint about him. Would serve him bloody right and maybe encourage him to keep his nose - and certain other parts of his anatomy - out of Frank's ED.

By day four, Jack was fed up with her behaviour. He had searched his memory and done nothing to offend her and if he had done something without meaning to, she should have said so. He waited until he had some free time then strode into her and Frank's office like a man on a mission.

"Keep the door open," she said coolly when she saw it was him. No way was she having people talk about the fact she and Jack had been holed up in her office, alone, with the door closed.

Jack shut it was obvious deliberateness. "You do not want anyone else hearing what I have to say to you," he said. He head snapped up at the tone of his voice. "You've been a complete cow the last four days and I want to know why."

"Jack, I have no issue with you, if you have a beef with me, maybe you should accept the fact I wouldn't sleep with you before you start thinking that anything else is the issue."

She was so cold, so blunt that Jack felt a shiver go through his spine. What in the world had happened to the woman who had climaxed in his arms, who had wanted to date him, who had told him upfront that as much as she liked him, she couldn't risk her reputation? He had been gutted, but he had respected her for being honest with him. But this Gabrielle... she knew damn well it wasn't over her refusal to date him (_date_ him, Jack clarified in his mind, not necasarily _sleep_ with him) but she brought it up anyway. "Excuse me?" he asked.

"You surgeons, you're all the same. You think any idiot is going to sleep with you and then just take it when you flaunt your newest conquest in their faces. I've got no time for that, Jack, and if you don't have tje good sense to keep your private life private, I'm not sure how much I can trust you professionally."

Jack just stared at her. What the hell was she talking about, newest conquest? The last woman he had been with had been _her_, and he detrainly hadn't been bringing any conquests into the ED. "I've no idea what you're talking about," he said. "There hasn't been anyone since you, and before that, there wasn't anyone since Deanna. I told you that when we met."

He was lying to her, and she became incenced. She wanted to throw her glass of water at him (the fact it was a glass didn't escape her notice) but restrained herself so she wouldn't look like a crazed, jealous ex. But then, you had to be someone's girlfriend or wife to be an ex. She was just a lay, she thought bitterly. "Stop with the bullshit, Jack," she said. "I don't care, I just want you to be honest for once."

"I am being honest," he said indignantly. He was torn between the desire to smack her for the conviction he was seeing someone else (where had she gotten _that_ idea?) and to take her in his arms and kiss her passionately. "I don't know what they put in the water in Queensland but I. Am. Not. Seeing. Someone. Or sleeping with them, either."

His patronising tone grated on her. Usually she was OK with the fact people seemed to have funny ideas about people who came from Queesland, let alone farms in Queensland (she blamed Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the man took ignorance and hiding behind defamation lawsuits to a whole new low, and made all Queenslanders look bad because of it) but when Jack said it... "You are so full of crap," she hissed. "You're just an educated city boy who thinks just because people aren't as smart or educated as you, you can make fun of them."

He'd come from a working-class family from the working-class suburbs of Sydney. He was the only Quade he knew of to get a tertiary education, and that was only because he had busted his gut for it. _How dare she?_ "If you want to talk in steretypes, then you're the country girl who uses her ignorance as a shield. You don't want to learn, you want to judge. _You_ decided you didn't want to get involved with me, remember? And now you're sitting there, accusing me of getting involved with other women when I haven't - and I certainly wouldn't bring them to the ED, given our history, because it's easier to hide behind your bullshit convervatism than stand by your decisions."

_Bullshit consevatism? _Anyone else and she would have heartily agreed about what was wrong with Queensland (and Western Australia, too) but when it came from Jack, it just sounded like lies to cover his own lying, hypocritical ass.

She got out from her desk. "I _saw_ you with her, you asshole," she hissed at him. "That - blond girl - Rebecca something..." She went to strike him and Jack caught her hands mid-air, twisting them behind her hand, pulling her into his so her head was against his chest. "I saw you with het, you never gave a shit about me, did you? She was your always girl and I was just something on the side."

It finally clicked what she was talking about. Him and Rebecca. He loved Rebecca deeply and passionately, was surprised at how deeply and passionately, would go to the ends of the earth for... but only ever as a brother. But he was aware of the fact they had different last names and looked nothing alike and... Oh, God, was _this_ was what she wa being a bitch about? She had seen him with his sister and gotten jealous, think Rebecca was something else? The thought made him vaugely queasy but also vaugely pleased... she liked him enough to get jealous over him!

He held her head against his chest, muffling her sobs, and his free hand pinned her wrists behind her so she couldn't do much but cry. "I can't stop thinking about you," he admitted. "I watch you and work and then I go home and can't sleep until I do sleep until I dream about you and..." he blushed to remember how many times he'd changed the sheets in the last two months. "I lie and tell Dan everything is Ok because I don't trust him not to gossip, I don't even trust Charlotte because she might go behind my back, and I tell everything to my sister, because Rebecca is the only one I trust with how intense my feelings are."

He could feel her sobs subsiding against his chest as she realised what ws really going on. Rebecca was his _sister_? Now she remembered... the fondness with which he had spoken about her, the love between siblings that she knew from her brothers - they could drive youbatty, they could do what you thought were the wrong things at the time... but they always had your back, were always looking out for you.

If Jack cared that much about her, she realised, then it was no wonder Rebecca hated her. She wanted someone who cared deeply about her brother, whereas she, Gabrielle, had decided her reputation was more important. He had cared about her, maybe fallen for her... and she had taken all that care and... told him she cared more about her reputation. "I'm sorry," she sobbed.

He kissed the top of her head. "I understand." Then he cupped her chin and wrenched it up so he could kiss her. And it was deep, and hungry. She felt her knees buckle and was saved by him letting go or her wrists and wrapping his arm around her waist, forcing her down because he needed to comsume her until the laws of physics said otherwise...

He pulled her up when he felt gravity begin to make itself known. He was so hungry to kiss her he hadn't realised how far down he had pulled her. He broke apart from her, panting. Helooked into her eyes and saw that she could deny what they had together no more than he could. "I want to come over tonight," he said thickly.

"I can do dinner," she agreed. "And... I've been tested and I'm clear and I can show the the certificate if you want."

He laughed and kissed her forehead. "You know how to ruin a moment, don't you?" He chuckled. He didn't particularly care. The bridge between them had been broken and now... "I'll be over at seven," he said.


	4. Chapter 4

_Thanks for reading! And it's a long chapter, so worth the wait! I know I've screwed up the timeline a bit - Charlotte's pregnancy, Mike's departure, how long Bianca is around, but I wanted to incorporate it into the story_. _And since it's a WIP, I'm going to be totally evil and not even START the new chapter until I get some feedback!_

"How do I look?"

"Like you're going to get laid in an hour so I don't think it cares what you wear."

Jack glared at Dan. "Don't be crass."

Dan smiriked. "Don't be nervous. It's not like you haven't slept with her. C'mon, Jack, she's invited you over for dinner. What else do you think that means?"

"I don't want to screw this up," Jack admitted. "I've been thinking about this for nearly two months and now it's here, I don't want to screw it up."

Dan raised his eyebrows. "I didn't realise she meant that much to you. I thought you were over it."

"Yeah, like I was going to tell _you_ something like that. You'd probably run to Erica. Or Cate." As much as he liked Dan, Jack hadn't forgotten about the time he and Cate had rung practically every hospital in Sydney to get the goss on Deanna. OK, they hadn't been housemates at the time but you didn't just go ringing around for dirt on your mate's girlfriend like that.

Dan chose to overlook that comment. He could see Jack was a bundle of nerves. "Calm. Down," he instructed Jack. "Or you'll get performance anxiety." Jack paled at that. "Just... go and have fun. And for heaven's sake, try to relax."

So Jack went, and picked up flowers on his way because he thought that's what he should do. His stomach was in knots by the time he got to her house. She was wearing a long floral dress which accentuated Her figure nicely, fastened with spaghetti straps that made Jack want to run his hands along the bare expanse of her shoulders. "Hi," he said, throat dry. "I, uh, got these for you." He held out the flowers.

"Jack, you're sweet. Come in." She led him through the front hall and he stifled the urge to wrap his arm around her waist and kiss her face and neck. He kept reminding himself he had waited two months, he could stand it until after dinner. "Dinner's going to be late, I'm sorry. Charlotte said you loved roast pork but I haven't learnt my way around a pig yet so you'll have to make do with lamb. Then it took me ages to find a cut I liked so I didn't get home until an hour ago and –"

"Gabby, it's fine, you shouldn't have gone to all this effort for me." If he'd known, he would have picked up takeout on his way.

He followed her into the kitchen and his stomach immediately started to rumble at the smell of roast lamb in the over. He'd been too nervous to think about food and now that he was here he realized how hungry he was. "It's been ages since someone cooked for me," he admitted.

She beamed. "So it will be nice to be pampered?" she asked with what she hoped was a flirtatious smile. She wasn't very good at flirtatiousness.

Something was off about her, but Jack couldn't put his finger on it so put it down to nerves. "Yeah," he admitted.

She jumped up onto the counter, legs dangling off it, and smiled at him. "Good. I want to make you feel good. Drink?" She gestured to a three-quarters full bottle of vodka. Jack didn't realized it had been opened an hour ago. "Charlotte said –"

"I don't know if I should be flattered or a little concerned you got all this information from Charlotte," Jack said, smiling as he poured himself straight vodka. It would hurt his stomach but dinner would be soon and he needed to relax.

Gabrielle looked caught out like a child being sneaky. "I'm sorry, I just wanted to make you feel special."

"I'm not angry, Gabby. I just didn't expect you to go to this effort." He squeezed her thigh reassuringly. "It's nice."

She took a long gulp of what was almost half-vodka, half-lemonade. She had felt desperately in need of a drink when she'd gotten home and the vodka had helped steady her nerves – a little. She couldn't believe how nervous she was. She desperately wanted to please Jack. Hearing the stories about him in the last few months had made her all the more aware of how experienced he was with women. Next to him, she was practically a virgin, and she didn't want her ineptitude to be a turn off.

She still wondered if she could have kept Steve faithful if she had known better what she was doing in bed.

"What's the Russian connection, anyway?" she asked, desperate to not have the conversation fall into awkward silence. "You read all those books and you seem to like vodka."

Jack laughed. "Vodka doesn't like me very much, always gets me into trouble. And my grandmother was Russian. She was the only person on dad's side of the family – actually, of all my father, other than Bec – who ever really cared for me."

"Past tense?" she asked, although she knew what the answer was.

"She died when I was thirteen." An ugly emotion flashed briefly over his face that Gabrielle mistook for grief.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. She had a good life. And it could have been worse. I could never have known this intelligent, well-read, well-travelled woman who made me want to be better than working class and uneducated." He put his drink down. "I don't want to talk about sad stuff. C'mere." Although it was more him going to her as he leaned in to kiss her.

He could taste the vodka on her breath but assumed that was just because she'd just been drinking it. He kissed her as gently as he could but found himself pushing harder, asking more of her. He placed one hand at the back of her hand and the other arm around her waist, her searched for her tongue and met it with his own… Gabrielle responded eagerly, kissing him back, running her fingers through his hair, down his back…

He picked her up and carried her to the couch, wedging her body between it and his own. Within minutes they were locked in a steamy make out session. She wrapped her legs around his and rubbed her body lewdly against his.

Warning bells were going off in his head. This wasn't the Gabrielle he knew. It had been two months but the Gabrielle he knew was shy and awkward, charmingly so, not wanting to appear trampy by being told bold. This Gabrielle was rubbing up against him like she was trying out for Basic Instinct 3.

"Stop," he said abruptly, and struggled to sit up. He cupped her face and forced her to meet his eyes. She was having trouble focusing and now that he thought about it, she had far too much vodka on her breath for it to be one innocent pre-dinner drink. "How much have you had to drink?" he asked, and he watched her eyes drop as much as they could given he had her face in a vice like grip. His brain started ticking. Gabrielle didn't strike him as a vodka drinker, so she probably bought it specially for him today. Which meant that quarter of a bottle had been finished off in the last hour. That was about five standard drinks, and on an empty stomach, too. "Jesus Christ, Gabby, why?" he asked in frustration.

He was angry, and she was drunk, and she started to cry. "I didn't want to be awkward and shy about it," she admitted. "I didn't want you to be turned off by my… ineptitude."

"Gabby…"

"I don't care what you said about not caring – you must care. How the hell can you stand being with someone who doesn't know what she's doing? No wonder Steve looked somewhere else."

Despite the fact she'd completely dismissed his honest assurances that her lack of experience didn't bother him, that she'd just indirectly compared him to a cheat and womanizer, his heart went out to her. He knew all too well how a bad sexual relationship early on could skewer your attitude towards it and relationships. "Listen to me," he said softly. "Firstly, you have my word that no matter what this thing between us is, so long as I'm sleeping with you, I won't sleep with anyone else. I told you about my dad and step-mum, I hated that woman but I couldn't live with myself if I put anyone through that. Do you believe me?"

She looked into his eyes and shivered from the force of integrity she could see there. Whatever mistakes he was inclined to make in relationships, infidelity, or anything that resembled infidelity, was not one of them. She nodded. "Secondly, being good in bed is not hard. It's like anything, you have to be willing to accept criticism and communicate well. Would you believe I was once absolutely awful?"

"You're making that up." She sniffled, but she smiled weakly through her sniffles so she had to be feeling a little better.

"I'm not. I've told you my step-mother was physically abusive. It took me a long time to stop associating being touched with pain… I'm lucky the first woman I was with was absolutely fantastic and got that… you know that trick I did with you, getting you to focus on my voice?" Gabrielle nodded. "I learnt it from her. It's not hard if you'll let me teach you. I want you and I want you to understand how experienced you are isn't important to me… it's how you make me feel. Do you get that?" Gabrielle nodded. "Good girl."

He kissed her, and she found comfort in his kisses. Jack was so good to understand all these things… She relaxed under his touch and the make out session, somewhat less steamy than before, resumed.

She went to unbutton his shirt and he pulled away. "I can't," he said.

"You just said you wanted me," she said.

"I do want you, but as well as it being unethical to have sex with someone who's drunk, if I knowingly have sex with someone who's not in a position to make informed consent, that's rape."

The word hung in the air like it was something dirty. "But Steve – "

"Gabby, you will either give me this guy's last name so I can track him down and break his neck for his antiquated ideas about sex, or you will never again try to draw a comparison between us. I don't give a shit what Steve said or did. I've felt bad enough taking advantage of someone when I was pretty out of it myself. I'm not going to do it when I'm sober."

She saw that integrity in his eyes and drunkenly wondered how people could say such things about him. "I'm sorry," she said, as soberly as she could manage.

He sighed and pulled her into his arms. He couldn't hold it against her. It had been a stupid thing to do but he'd done some pretty stupid things himself. "It's OK," he said. It had broken the ice at least. "Go get some water and since we have an hour to kill, why don't you finish telling me about farm life?"

"No, I want to hear about St. Petersburg."

Even through a drunken haze, she knew she had said the right thing when he smiled. She had known a Russian girl in school, not that well, but well enough to understand Tanya was fundamentally no different in how she felt about things, just more guarded. She giggled as she went off to get the water. Jack asked her what she was still giggling about when she came back. "Everyone whinges they don't understand Russians, they're so secretive," she said. "But it's easy. You just have to understand they don't go blabbing their emotions to the rooftops like we do."

"I'm only a quarter Russian, and even that's dubious, because Ana was half-French."

Gabrielle shrugged. "You're still very private. You… I knew a Russian girl once, and she said something about the differences in mentalities, that Russia was an inch wide and a mile deep and Australia was a mile wide and an inch deep… I had always thought her such a loner but that's always stuck with me, why she couldn't relate to Australians and why we couldn't relate to her. You're kind of like that. Except I get you."

It was the kind of profound truth that only the drunk can come up with and Jack wanted to kiss her. She did get him, he realized. Or at least she got him more than most did. She and Charlotte. He fought the urge to take her to bed, how strongly he felt about her in that moment was that intense.

They continued to talk until dinner was ready. She was a good cook and he was starving. He noticed she ate a lot. Good, she needed something in her stomach. "Is it OK?" she asked him.

It took him a minute to clear his mouth. "It's amazing," he gushed. "It's been so long since someone cooked for me – I mean, I'm not too bad myself but there's something about someone else doing it… thankyou." She squirmed under his praise.

After the dishes were washed he took her in his arms and met her eyes with his. She didn't have any trouble focusing on him, although he could read the shame in her eyes. "It's OK," he said soothingly. "But I want you to feel you can be honest with me. I don't care what it is but I never want you to feel like you have to hide something from me… or get drunk to be something you're not for me. OK?" She nodded. "Let's try again." He kissed her with such gentleness that within a minute she was longing for something more… and at the same time, reveling in the deliberate slowness. She'd never thought of kissing as anything other than foreplay and needed it badly. That Jack seemed to have no interest in anything but kissing her right now – she shivered and started to feel giddy after a few minutes.

"Feeling OK?" he asked. She nodded wordlessly. "Where's your room?" he asked.

She took his hand and led him to her bedroom. He sat on the bed and motioned for her to join him. She straddled him and he wrapped his arms around her waist. He ran his hands up and down her back, over her almost-bare shoulders… he was starting to feel a little giddy himself.

He let her unbutton his shirt and kiss him across his face and neck and felt the increasing pressure of her mouth on his neck. He knew she was going to leave a mark and didn't care, it felt so good. In fact, payback would be fun. He closed his eyes and started to breathe heavily, completely lost in the moment. Making out had never been sp much fun or so sensual… He opened his eyes suddenly when he felt his pants start to tighten. "Oh, God." It was too soon. He wasn't ready to have her yet. Not that he could really blame himself. It had been two months of wet dreams being his body's only stimulation and now his mind and body had kicked into overdrive. Damnit, he should have taken care of this before he left the house. He wasn't ready. He wasn't –

He was surprised at how well Gabrielle knew how to handle the situation. She could feel it in the way he suddenly tensed up that he wasn't ready for her yet – she didn't understand why, because she was under the impression that all guys wanted to get their rocks off as quickly as possible – but she got that he wasn't ready yet. He was kind of like a girl in that way, you could be turned on and physically ready to go but in your head… Her understanding of Jack overcame her lack of understanding of men and sex in general and she suddenly knew how to deal with the situation.

She pushed against him so he knew he was supposed to lie down. He kept his eyes closed as she touched him because it heightened his ability to feel her, smell her, hear her. He started to whimper as she moved one hand down his body and cried out when she touched him through his pants.

She unzipped her dress so she could lie next to him, her skin against his, and he responded by wrapping his arm around her. Eyes still closed, he ran his hand urgently up and down her bare back, not trying to achieve anything, just wanting to feel her.

She went back to what she had been doing, touching him through his pants until he was writhing and whimpering, biting down on his lip to stop from crying out too loudly. She kissed him. "You can scream if you want to," she said. It was a turn-on to know she could make him feel that way and besides, he was going to do some serious damage if he bit down every time he wanted to scream.

He didn't scream when she unzipped his pants and started caressing him, although he felt close to it. She started stroking him and watched as he writhed and bucked under her touch, his face contorting in pleasure as she brought him to a climax…

"And you think you can't make me happy," Jack scoffed a few second later. She was lying placidly in his arms, which was all he had the energy to do that very second. He felt exhausted, she had a way of doing that to him. "I think I'm going to have to spoil you to make sure you don't leave me."

She grinned at him. "Promise?"

"Yeah, why not? I like spoiling my girls."

She settled back in his arms and mostly succeeded in focusing on the fact he'd referred to her as his girl, and not the fact he'd said 'girls' plural.

After a while his energy started returning. He instructed her to get on top of him, and she did. There was something insanely sexy about having her straddled across him wearing only her underwear. He ran his hands up her legs, across her abdomen and up her body, along her bare back. She closed her eyes and leaned back slightly, passively enjoying his touch. He unclipped her bra and cupped her breasts, running his fingers over her nipples until she was sighing… placing his hands on the small of her back, he pushed her towards him so she was practically lying on top of him and he could kiss her breasts with abandon. She was moaning now and having difficultly staying upright but Jack was far from done with her.

He slid his hands down her back, inside her panties, squeezing her ass, pulling her panties down so he had better access. Obligingly, she rose up slightly to help him get them off – after all, she was benefitting from it so it was only fair. From there he touched her intimately, his fingers probing and caressing, locating places she had no idea could be so receptive to pleasure. "Oh, God, Jack," she cried out. He didn't go as easy on her this time and within a few minutes he had her sobbing as she climaxed.

He had wanted her on top of him but he could see she didn't have the energy for it. Maybe he could have gone a little easier on her. He flipped them over so he was on top of her and penetrated her completely. Once he was inside her, he stopped, taking in the feeling. He couldn't believe he'd managed to spend two months so close to her without being able to do this. "I missed you," he said hoarsely, and started to move inside her.

For twenty minutes he pumped her solidly, touching her in the way he did to bring her to orgasm another two times until he had pushed her to the brink of exhaustion. This time he did scream. He buried his head in the pillow and needed a minute to get his breathing under control so he could speak. "I missed you," he repeated.

"I missed you too."

He kissed her forehead with an odd chasteness and chuckled. "And I've missed not having to use a condom, too." He missed not having to withdraw immediately for fear of slippage. For a few minutes he stayed inside her before rolling onto his back. She snuggled into his arms.

Now that the initial euphoria had worn off, he realized how tired he was. "I don't know how, but you do something to me," he gushed. He'd felt it the first night they were together and he was feeling it now. "You make me feel amazing."

"You're not exactly bad yourself," Gabrielle returned. She could scarcely believe that she could make him feel as good, let alone better than someone of the other women he'd been with, but she didn't want to annoy him by questioning him again.

After fifteen minutes of lying together in silence, Jack said "I have next Wednesday night free and a late on Thursday, we can go to the place I was planning to take you for dinner when we first got together. It's getting a bit ridiculous that it's been two months, two nights together and we haven't even gone on a date."

She tensed up in his arms in a way he definitely didn't like. "Jack…" she said, not sure if she could find the words to say how she felt without breaking his heart. And he had been so gracious about everything else, too.

"You still don't want to risk your reputation having people know about us," he said flatly. She squirmed and started to explain but he cut her off. "I understand," he said, "I'm just disappointed." Disappointment was not the right word; absolutely gutted was closer to it. In his heart, he had already known this was a possibility but for her to actually say it… he'd been in casual sex relationships before, but not with a colleague, and he knew how hard it was going to be, being so close to her during the day and not being able to touch her. Maybe she would change her mind when she realized how hard it was. "Dan already knows, but he'll keep his mouth shut if I tell him how important it is. And Charlotte will work it out. And Frank needs to know."

"Why?"

"Because I screwed him over with Deanna and Terri, hell, Charlotte even, and he has a right to know where my loyalties are. It's been hard to forgive myself for Deanna and earn Frank's trust again and I won't jeopardize that, not even for you. If you won't let me tell him, I won't see you again."

Gabrielle had to admit, Jack had a point.. Jack had caused havoc with his previous relationships with ED staff members, in part because he was keeping them secret. A huge part of the fallout from his relationship with Terri had come from the fact Frank hadn't known about it until the whole thing had blown up, and the less said about Deanna, the better. And she had to respect Jack's integrity in regards to tell Frank or stop seeing her. "OK, I'll talk to him," she agreed in a small voice, because she knew he wasn't going to be happy about it.

"I was going to talk to him. It's my problem, not yours." Gabrielle didn't say anything to the contrary so Jack took that to mean she was happy for him to take responsibility. He couldn't blame her for that. Frank Campion was not someone you wanted to have to confess something to.

* * *

Later the next day Jack made his way to Frank's office, feeling a little like a naughty schoolboy. It didn't help that he was so tired – and he'd had the benefit of being able to go home and get a few hours extra sleep after Gabrielle had to leave for work, too. He made a mental note to plans their nights together around them both having lates or days off the next day, or him not staying the night. Having her in his arms all night made him so horny and completely broke up his sleep and…

"Quade, what the bloody hell are you grinning at?" Frank asked, bringing Jack back to earth – and the unpleasant task at hand.

"I, uh, need to talk to you about something," he stumbled out.

"Well spit it out then," Frank said impatiently. He had a feeling he wasn't going to like this. Jack was looking very guilty.

"Gabby and I are seeing each other," he said.

"Quade, that's not funny."

"Oh, you think I would make something like that up? I don't exactly enjoy getting on your bad side, Frank."

Frank realized Jack was telling the truth. "Bloody hell," he said. Was Jack incapable of sleeping with someone outside his ED? Well, he'd been Jillian Henderson's problem for a while but he always brought it back here. "OK, what do you mean by seeing each other?"

Jack squirmed. "We're sleeping together," he admitted. Then he added, although it wasn't really relevant, "She doesn't want to date me."

"And become public property as your latest conquest? Can't say I blame the girl, not with your reputation."

Jack flinched. "You don't need to tell me about my reputation, Frank. It's why she wouldn't keep seeing me after the first night." Jack realized he'd just let it slip that he had known Gabrielle before she had started working at All Saints, and he had to explain that one. "We really tried, Frank, and I think if she hadn't gotten so upset about Bec we could have kept going. But I can't pretend I don't care about her anymore and I thought you had a right to know."

Frank harrumphed. But at least Jack was good enough to come and tell him. And he liked Gabrielle, although he'd never admit it to her (or Jack, for that matter). He liked her for the same reasons Jack did, although in wildly different ways, her complete lack of pretentions, her inability to be anything but truthful, her awkwardness when it came to politicking or manipulation that was endearing. He trusted her not to screw him or the ED over.

And hell, maybe she could get Jack to come out from that cloud he'd been under since Charlotte's miscarriage.

"At least you told me," he conceded grumpily. "Now get, I have things to do." Jack got, pleased that things went that well – he knew Frank well enough to know things could have been a lot worse.

* * *

"I could barely keep my hands off you all day," Jack admitted huskily the following day. He'd been straining at the bit to go home as soon as five o'clock – Gabrielle's quit time – had rolled around until Mike finally got fed up with him and let him go. That Jack had plans to get laid was obvious, and Mike heartily approved. Whoever she was, maybe she could get the stick out of his ass. The man was so uptight about things.

He'd gone straight to her house without bothering to go home to change. It wasn't like he'd be in his clothes for long, anyway. She answered, having changed into a t-shirt and trackpants, but she looked insanely sexy to him. It had been two days since their last rendezvous, including today, an agonizingly slow day when he was forced to spend several hours in the ED on a trauma case with her in his view. Several hours of wanting to touch her, smile at her and not being able to. Frank had secretly been impressed that they hadn't betrayed themselves with so much as a longing look.

The second Mike had let him go, he'd raced out of the hospital and to Gabrielle's. As soon as she opened the door he started kissing her, nearly suffocating her with his embraces.

"I know," she said. "I didn't think it would be this hard."

He backed her into the wall forcefully to give himself better leverage. His kisses were hard and hungry and his hands roamed freely over her body. He felt absolutely starved for her and unable to stop now they were finally alone.

His forcefulness surprised her and thrilled her a little. He had always been so gentle, so respectful of her personal space but now he was groping her like it was going out of fashion and not stopping to ask if it was OK.

Of course it was OK. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her.

The next few minutes were a flurry of getting clothes off and getting into her room, which was difficult, given neither of them wanted to stop what they were doing even for the minute it would take to accomplish the tasks. He pushed her onto the bed and then flipped her over onto her stomach with ease. She'd already known he had a lot of strength but was surprised just how easily he could handle her like a ragdoll if he wanted to. Yet she didn't feel for a second like she was being made to do anything, even though she'd never much liked this position.

He took her panties off and fingered her briefly, more to make sure she was wet enough than for any real foreplay. She was. He penetrated her without any more delay, slamming into her with enough force that if she had been any less wet, it would have hurt. But she already knew he wouldn't have done it if he'd thought it would hurt.

It only lasted a few minutes but they were intense. Afterwards they lay in bed together, exchanging pillow talk when Jack said, "Did Bart ask you if we had a fight?"

"Yeah. He wanted to know if we were mates again and what it had been about. I told him it was just a disagreement. Why?"

"He asked me what it was about. I told him I have a very sexual sense of humour and that you're practically a virgin by my standards and that given my history and my tendency to shoot my both off, I said some things you thought was harassment but it was sorted now."

Gabrielle gasped. "You did not tell him that! Jack, this is Bart. He's so proper… you've probably scarred him for life."

"That was the point. He shouldn't have been asking me about it. But he won't talk to me now unless he really has to."

"You are so evil." But she had to laugh. Bart hadn't been that clever in asking Jack about his private life, everyone who'd known him more than a few weeks knew that. Even Dan worked that out quickly, and Dan was the biggest gossip she knew.

"I love you too," he said flippantly.

She frowned. "Don't joke about that," she said quietly.

He looked at her quizzically. "I wasn't being serious."

"I know. I don't expect you to love me, Jack, I just don't want to hear you say it as a joke."

He looked at her carefully. Someone – he wondered if it was this Steve jerk – had hurt her badly enough by treating love as a disposable sentiment. So she had her hang-ups. Didn't he? "I'm sorry," he said. "I was just being stupid. If you feel that way about it, I won't say it again unless I mean it."

"Thankyou. You're sweet."

"I want you to be comfortable with me. That's just common sense, that's not sweet." Gabrielle poked her tongue out at him and he took the opportunity to kiss her.

* * *

Spence certainly knew how to buy the most ostentatious thing he could find. Jack had never liked the guy and the feeling was mutual. Jack didn't think Spence was good enough for Charlotte and Spence thought it was creepy the way their close friendship was founded on a miscarriage. So Jack found it easy to judge the guy for that awful massive teddy which wasn't much smaller than Charlotte herself. Really, what was the kid going to do with it?

"Charlotte, is there something you're not telling us? Are you pregnant?" Gabrielle asked.

Well, she could hardly deny it now that the teddy and balloons had arrived. "Yes, I am," she admitted.

Gabrielle and Erica looked excited. "Yay, Charlotte," Erica said.

Gabrielle was that happy and excited for Charlotte that she missed the look that briefly crossed Jack's pain – it had been the same look when he'd talked about his grandmother dying, grief and… it had been more than that. It had been the same look but it was more than just grief. Repressed grief and impotent anger over the repressed grief.

But it was gone in a flash. "Congratulations," he said, leaning over to shake her hand and kiss her cheek. He really was happy for her, he knew how much it meant to her, that it was an ever-present concern for her that at her age she might never be a mother.

But Charlotte falling pregnant was always going to make him think of Tara, and when he did, those old feelings of grief and anger and wanting to hunt down the guy and put him in the same place Tara was came to the surface. He choked back his emotions. He'd be the worst kind of friend if he took what was such a happy occasion for her and made it about painful memories for both of them.

"Thanks Jack," Charlotte said, accepting his affection without realizing the cost it took to hide his feelings. Why should she, this was something she had wanted for so long, had begun to give up hope of ever getting.

"Hang about…" Dan piped up, and Gabrielle cringed inwardly, because she knew what was coming next. If she could have done it without revealing why she was concerned for Jack, she would have kicked his frequently-insensitive gossip queen of a housemate.

"It had nothing to do with me," Jack said, and he even managed a smile. It made Gabrielle's heart go out for him. She tried to speak to him later that day when he was on his way to surgery – they really couldn't afford to be seen talking socially, let alone something so personal, but she couldn't not give him the comfort he needed, either. But he brushed her off with a smile that was so cheery it couldn't be real and an assurance that he was fine, it had been ages ago and he was so happy for Charlotte.

Bullshit.

To make matters worse, he managed to be busy for the next three nights. This was the Jack who took every opportunity he had to be with her, even though he only stayed over when they both had days off or late starts the next day. He was always conveniently busy, always promising he'd find time soon but just not right now. It got to a point that even Frank commented about it. "I don't think he's taking this pregnancy business as well as he's making out," the doctor had said in his usual gruff manner. And Gabrielle didn't even know that Frank had brought it up because Mike had brought it up with Frank. He didn't know enough to connect Charlotte's pregnancy with her previous pregnancy, but enough to know something had gotten into Jack that had taken a lot of the light from his eyes that had been there since he'd started getting laid. So for Mike to go to Frank for a solution and Frank to go to Gabrielle meant Jack was doing a lousy job of hiding his feelings. And he was avoiding her rather than admit to those feelings.

He was avoiding her because he knew she would force him to confront his feelings. Well, he couldn't hide from her forever. She wasn't afraid to lock horns with Frank Campion when she knew the outcome was the only right one, and she wasn't afraid to do it with a man she cared a great deal for.

She organized for Dan to vacate the house he shared with Jack on an afternoon she knew he'd be free (she assumed he did something with Erica; those two were really pally and it had crossed her mind more than once that they would make a good couple) and showed up unannounced; she knew if she told him her intentions he would give his excuses, or she'd show up and find he'd had to go out for something. She was surprised at how sad he looked now that he wasn't trying to act like everything was OK for Charlotte's sake. "We need to talk," she said, marching through the house and adopting her authortive, person-in-charge-of-the-situation voice.

"I'm fine, Gabby. Just haven't been feeling well lately."

"You haven't been feeling well because you're heart's broken and you won't admit to it," she responded, and he blanched as if she'd slapped him. Which she was quite happy to do if it shocked him out of this land of denial he was living in.

"It is not. It was ages ago."

She pointed to the couch. "Sit." He sat. She had a way of getting even the most stubborn men to follow her orders when she needed them to follow her orders. "It was only a year ago and knowing you, you were too busy being there for Charlotte to admit you needed anyone to be there for yourself." She sat on his lap. He didn't try to throw her off, which was a good thing. "Jack, it's only me here. You don't have to be strong and pretend to be happy for Charlotte now. You can be as angry and sad as you want for as long as you want when it's just us. You need someone, Jack, and I care about you. Let me help you."

She spoke so soothingly and gently wrapped around them a cocoon in which he felt he could share his emotions. It was the objectivity of a stranger that had first made him open up to her, and they had never really lost that element in their relationship, even though they were far from strangers now.

The effect was like a dam bursting. Within minutes he was sobbing uncontrollably in her arms. She didn't say anything, just held him while he rambled about how much it hurt, how much it had hurt at the time, how much it hurt now that Charlotte's pregnancy was a reminder of the child she wasn't destined to carry to term. This pregnancy felt like some kind of cruel sign that she had moved on but he hadn't. "And everyone thinks I didn't care, like I was happy when she miscarried, like I could be that much of an asshole even if I hadn't wanted it, like I was out celebrating my close call. But I did care and no-one believes that."

The poor guy. To go through such a thing and to have people assume you were – if not happy about it, than relieved – she couldn't imagine how Jack had felt about that. "I believe you and so does Charlotte. And I think Dan does too, for all he can be a jerk sometimes. And so does Frank. And we're the ones who count, aren't we?" Jack rubbed his face against her shirt for yes; his throat was too hoarse for speaking.

She kissed his head and held him tightly. She fought the urge to tell him that she loved him; she knew love was something that was sorely missing in his life, but she also knew the last thing he needed was for her to say something she wasn't sure she meant. But she cared a great deal for him, she knew that, and she wanted to support him when he needed someone who cared about him. "I'm here for you," she murmured as his tears subsided. And then her mind found the words which were even better than telling him she loved him, and on top of that, the truth. "I swear to God I will always be here for you. No matter what happens between us in the future, I will always be your friends and I will always be here if you need someone who cares about you."

"Thankyou," he whispered. It was exactly what he needed to hear.

* * *

"Hospital ball is on next Saturday."

Gabrielle made a face. "I know. Frank's making me go." Which meant she had to find a dress. She couldn't remember the last time she had worn a dress except to church on Sunday, let alone something fitting for a ball. She'd been meaning to ask Rebecca for advice. The girl always looked so stylish and more to the point, it would be a good way of ingratiating herself. Rebecca had half-heartedly taken to her since Jack had announced they were 'together' – but the thing with Rebecca (both admirable and damning) was that she knew Jack with some instinct that Gabrielle would never have – she chalked it up to DNA. And she knew Jack wasn't happy with the way things were between him and Gabrielle. It had been almost two months since they had first started their friends-with-benefits type arrangement and Jack had been keen to go public from the first night.

But Gabrielle was hesitant because she didn't want to have her name linked to Jack's and then have him lose interest in her and leave her carrying the dubious title of being his latest conquest. So she kept putting him off. First it was one month, than it was two. She knew he was going to raise a stink when she pleaded for another month. She just never felt ready.

She knew in her heart she was waiting for Jack to tell her he loved her. He had kept his promise of not saying it unless he meant it made almost two months ago, and she was grateful to him for it. Too many times she'd been told those words by men who either wanted to get laid or were too selfish and immature to get what it meant. But now she longed to hear him say it, knowing he would mean it sincerely, and she knew deep down that's what she was holding out for. Because if Jack loved her – Jack, who had so much sincerity and integrity – then he wasn't going to leave her high and dry over some whim.

But the upshot of it was that Rebecca didn't think much of her, and Gabrielle was constantly trying to find the girl's liking and approval. And going to her for advice on ball clothes was one thing she had thought of.

"I thought we could go together."

Gabrielle stiffened in Jack's arms. She was surprised she hadn't thought of this before. The ball fell three days after their two-month anniversary – that was, the two month anniversary of the second night they had spent together. She had promised Jack after two months and it was an excellent opportunity to out themselves – dolled up, ready for photographs.

The list of people who knew was getting longer. Erica knew, because she was Dan's best friend and he had a tendency to talk about Jack and Gabrielle like they were an outed couple, as in "Jack and Gabrielle have gone to dinner with Rebecca and her dad, they won't be back for a while" so he was bound to slip with her after a while. And Mike knew because one day they'd had a fight about her reluctance to go public and she'd been forced to concede a kiss in the surgeon's lunge to make up for it, which Mike had walked in on. So that made Charlotte, Frank, Dan, Erica and Mike.

Gabrielle was floored so far none of them (apart from Dan's slip to Erica) had let it slip to anyone else, and she knew she had to largely credit Jack's discretion for that. So many times she had gone to smile at him and found herself cut dead by his cold stare. He wanted to go public but was respecting her desire not to even to the extent that he covered her indiscretions.

She knew she was being a cow about it but she needed that extra reassurance.

"You know how I feel about that," she said.

"I know you said one month when we started seeing each other and at one month you said two and it will be two before the ball."

"Jack, please…"

He glared at her. "You know I hate this situation. I think I've been pretty patient and you keep putting it off. Do you have any intention of going public or are you planning to keep fobbing me off until I get sick of it and leave?"

His threat to leave hadn't been a serious one but it still unnerved her to hear. "Of course I'm not fobbing you off," she said. "Please Jack, just a little more time."

She went to touch him but he threw her hand off. "I'm not in the mood," he said. He got out of bed and started getting dressed.

"Where are you going?" It was a rare night where they had the opportunity for him to stay over.

"Home. I don't want to stay here."

His words cut deeply into her. She understood why he was angry but something wouldn't let her give Jack what he wanted. She watched him go, acutely aware that he didn't even kiss her goodbye.

* * *

„…So having two doctor in the house wasn't exactly the most harmonious arrangement, it was almost a relief when we were separated. I vowed I was never again living with someone who had the intelligence and ego to match mine." So spoke Zoe Gallagher which a smile on her lips and in her eyes so it was apparent she was only joking. She had taken well to Jack precisely because he could match her intelligence – and more importantly, respected her for being smart.

"So what you're really after is some dumb yes-man?" Jack summarized, smiling too. He liked Zoe. He hadn't thought he would on account that she was Charlotte's replacement but he got on well with her. She was smart and professional and she wasn't exactly sore on the eye. Not that Jack was interested but after his clash with Gabrielle it was pleasant to have someone for company who he could talk with openly.

They'd barely spoken since that night, and never been alone. He wasn't sure exactly how it had escalated but he was too pissed off to want to talk to her. They would only talk in circles anyway so what was the point?

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her. God, she was so beautiful, even more so in that dress, a pale green strapless gown. He wanted to hold her. Sean was dancing with her now and he wanted to cut in. She couldn't exactly turn him down, not at a hospital ball, and it would mean he'd get to hold her in public.

But he didn't. He had made his feelings known and he thought he was being quite reasonable. He'd lose face if he talked to her now, and then she'd know she could walk all over him.

"Something like that," Zoe said, bringing him back to the conversation. "Truth be told, I don't know what I want. Your tastes change as you get older."

"I look forward to that day," Jack said ruefully. He seemed to have a knack for getting involved with women who didn't want to see seen with him in public. "If you don't mind me asking, why did you and he break up?"

Zoe grimaced. But she decided Jack was trustworthy enough and not the type to judge. "We rarely saw each other and I… cheated on him. He couldn't forgive me. I was angry about it at the time but it was for the best, I think. There's nothing quite as bad as staying with someone when you can't forgive them."

"My dad was a compulsive womanizer and my stepmother never left him. I don't know why, I guess she loved him too much. But everyone would have been so much happier if she had left him, it seemed like such a waste of everyone's happiness that she stayed. Forgive and stay or don't forgive and leave but you can't not forgive and stay, it just breeds resentment and misery."

"That's incredibly mature for someone your age," Zoe said.

Jack made a face. "If you met my family, you'd understand."

"Can't have been any worse than some of the foster families I had," she said. She had no idea why she was telling Jack this, maybe he was right about too much to drink, maybe it was that he struck her as someone who appreciated first hand how character-defining a bad childhood was. "The kind where white trash automatically gets elevate to royalty by comparison."

Jack laughed. That was exactly it. "I think my dad was a little ashamed I not only got into uni, but got in on a full scholarship when I was sixteen. And then when I applied for emancipation and they interviewed Stella, she was completely drunk at ten in the morning. I think that was all they needed to know."

Zoe smiled. She had been right about Jack coming from a bad childhood. Emancipation wasn't exactly something that was awarded simply because your parents were a bit neglectful. He was a man who appreciated from personal experience how much strength it took to overcome being dealt a crappy hand early in life. They were going to get along fine. "What's the deal with you personally?" she asked sweetly. "I hear all these rumors about you but haven't found anyone to say they'd slept with you. Apart from Charlotte. And Jillian Henderson."

"Jillian is definitely one of my less proud moments," Jack admitted. "At least since uni."

"Bet you were a real player," she teased.

"Uh-huh. Got it out of my system when I was young."

"You've mellowed in your old age, have you?"

"Absolutely."

"So… you're not seeing anyone?"

He looked over at Gabrielle, who had been dancing far too long with Sean for his liking. "Nope," he said. "Why, are you hitting on me?"

"Hitting on you sounds so juvenile, Jack. Call it… expressing interest."

Jack, who had definitely had too much champagne at this point and was thoroughly pissed off that Gabrielle let Sean hold her that way, met her eyes and let Zoe keep her hand on his thigh far longer than he should have.

* * *

"I can't believe you let her touch you like that!" Gabrielle screamed at him the next day. He had come over, at her request, thinking maybe she had changed her mind about seeing him publicly, only to be greeted with a very hard slap across the face.

"I could say the same thing about you and Sean!" he screamed back.

"We were just dancing!" Gabrielle defended herself.

"We were just talking," Jack retorted.

"She put her hand on your thigh." Seeing the beautiful blond woman touch Jack sexually had broken her heart. She was aware other women found him attractive but to see it for herself – and not only that, but Jack had been far too receptive to Zoe's touch. And he hadn't gotten laid in over a week. At least, not with her. And Jack has a strong libido, she knew that firsthand.

"You realize you just said she touched me. I didn't exactly grab her hand and put it there myself."

"You didn't exactly push it away in a hurry, anyway."

"I was drunk and pissed off seeing you with Sean. Not the brightest thing, I'll admit, but you're acting like I slept with her."

"Did you?" Gabrielle hadn't meant to say it but Jack had put it out there, bringing up her worst fear. She was terrified of the day when Jack was bored and horny and had maybe had a few too many drinks and…

"I can't believe you just asked me that." Her question had twisted a knife through his heart. What had he ever said or done to make her think he'd play around on her? God, he'd even done his best to curtain the fact he was naturally flirtatious with women when Gabrielle was around. And one stupid indiscretion which was hardly an indiscretion at all…

"You didn't answer the question."

His eyes flashed dangerously and she knew she'd pushed him too far. Knew he hadn't done anything worse than let Zoe keep her hand on his thigh longer than he should have. But it had hurt so much to see another woman, a more beautiful woman, a smarter woman, not doubt a more sophisticated woman feeling him up that she couldn't think straight.

"No, I didn't. I have been nothing but faithful to you, although I don't exactly know why, it's not like you're my girlfriend."

His words hung between them. Was he threatening her? Was he expecting praise for being faithful? It was so bloody typical, guys expected it from women as the standard but if they gave it themselves they were legendary human beings. Screwing around was the standard for men in the same way fidelity was for women. "Sleep with whoever you like!" she spat.

He couldn't believe she had just said that. Was she calling it off just because he'd let Zoe touch him? "Fine!" he spat back.

"Get out of my house."

"Like I want to stay." He stormed out, slamming the door for extra measure, and drove his car halfway down the street before his tears made his vision too hazy to drive. He stopped the car and sobbed.

In her house, Gabrielle was shaking. She felt weak and like she was going to throw up. She did throw up, barely making it to the toilet in time. She stayed hunched over the toilet bowl, feeling dizzy and weak. Jack had just walked out, his second-to-last words a threat – or a promise – to get laid.

A vision entered her mind of him in some bar with some beautiful woman like Zoe coming up to him, buying him a drink, smiling flirtatiously at him and… she threw up again and started to cry. Jack had just left her and was probably finding someone else this very second and she had no-one to blame but herself and her insecurities.

* * *

"Is Jack always this charming or does he save it for the people he has to work for?"

"Lay of him, OK. He and Gabrielle had a massive fight a few days ago and he's been like this ever since." Dan had been seeing Bianca Frost for two weeks now (although seeing her was a bit of an overstatement since they had the same relationship as Jack and Gabrielle had only with no intention of upgrading it to dating) and he was becoming more and more away of her irrational hatred for Jack.

As far as he knew, the two hadn't met before and when he'd asked Bianca about it, she had just shrugged and said something about cock surgeons who'd cruised through life on trust funds and who thought they had a right to any woman they wanted. Not only was that absolutely not true about Jack – Dan knew enough about him, including the physical abuse and the emancipation – but she only applied that Logic to Jack. The other surgeons she got on fine with.

But he wasn't interested in her as a potential girlfriend and for that reason it wasn't that important that she and his best friend and housemate like each other.

Bianca pricked her ears up at Dan's reference to Jack and Gabrielle. She wasn't surprised to know he was sleeping with yet another ED NUM – although she wasn't surprised she hadn't gotten wind of it yet. She had an excellent radar when it came to gossip, the more vicious, the better she picked up on it. "How long has he been seeing her? Things like this get out pretty quickly."

Dan looked at her curiously. She hadn't expressed an interest in Jack's life beyond bagging him before – in fact, she'd expressed a distinct disinterest whenever he'd tried to set her straight about Jack not being the pampered womanizer she thought he was. "About two months now," he said.

Interesting, she thought. So Jack had managed to keep it a secret for two months. Bianca wondered what the fight had been about. Probably the fact he wanted to keep it a secret and she didn't. Gabrielle Jaeger was not the kind of woman men like jack dated publicly. Not pretty enough, not smart enough, not sophisticated enough.

The next day she engineered her way into the ED and Gabrielle's office. "I can see he really misses you," she cooed with syrupy sweetness that put Gabrielle on edge. Bianca was not good at false sweetness and Gabrielle was too honest-to-the-bone not to be able to detect the bullshit factor there.

"I'm sorry?" she asked distractedly. Jack had been doing his best to avoid her but every time she saw him her heart broke. He looked straight through her as if she didn't exist. She didn't realize how much effort this took him when he really wanted to admit he had been wrong and take her in his arms. She just saw – or thought she saw – contempt. And maybe he was thinking about another woman.

"You and Jack. Dan told me about you guys."

"Did he also tell you we broke it off?" Gabrielle asked, annoyed at Dan for telling her something like that. She didn't trust Bianca beyond being a brilliant surgeon.

"No, but I can tell by the way Jack acts that he's really upset and I could tell by the way he looks at you when you're not watching." Which was actually true, but Bianca took that to mean horniness as opposed to affection. Women like Gabrielle were supposed to be really good in bed. They had to be, she didn't have much to offer in any other department. "Look, Jack and I don't get along that well, but I hate seeing people apart and miserable when they're obviously meant to be together. And maybe if you smooth things over that will make him much easier to work with."

Gabrielle sighed. Now that she'd had a few days to think about it, she knew how in the wrong she had been. For her to bring infidelity into the conversation – no wonder he'd gotten so upset. And when she'd mentioned to Zoe that she and Jack had seemed pretty pally at the ball, Zoe had shrugged it off, saying Jack was an interesting man but she could tell he was interested in someone else. Not that he said anything but she knew when a man was distracted by a woman.

She had felt like the world's biggest idiot when Zoe had said that. Naturally, Jack hadn't encouraged her at all, apart from maybe letting her touch him longer than he should have – and even that was kind of understandable, because she could admit now that she had done the same thing with Sean, trying to make him jealous.

She couldn't get Bianca's words out of her head and finally she waited for him outside his car. It was the end of a long shift and when he saw her standing there, he scowled. He was in no mood for a confrontation with her, not after Bianca had put him through the wringer for sport.

Bianca Frost. He had no idea what he'd done to offend her. She'd given him some spiel about arrogant surgeons coasting through on daddy's money but it was only him she was gunning for, not the whole department. She was being a bitch only to him and he had no idea why. And because of his fight with Gabrielle, he couldn't seek refuge at her place when she stayed over with Dan. And she stayed over most nights.

When he got up close to her she saw for the first time the bags under his eyes. "Are you OK?" she asked, even though it was obvious she wasn't.

"You try sleeping when Bianca's over. She's noisy. I don't know why they can't go to hers."

"I'll put Dan on nights if you'd like," she offered, and he saw that she was being quite serious.

"Do you want something?" he asked tiredly.

"Jack, I'm sorry," she blurted out. "I got so jealous and insecure when I saw you with Zoe – I know you didn't do anything wrong but whenever I see you with someone who's prettier and smarter than me, I wonder what it is you see in me."

"Gabby, I can't keep reassuring you. It's exhausting. I'm crazy about you and you keep questioning me and making excuses why you don't want to go public – I'm sick of it."

The tiredness in his voice emphasized his feelings. She knew she had to offer him something good for him to reconcile with her. "My parents are coming down the weekend after next," she said. "I want you to meet them. If they like you – I can't promise you an exact date but if they like you… then soon after that."

"You're not going to fob me off again/" he asked guardedly.

"I promise."

The two words had the effect of rejuvenating him and lighting up his face. He dropped his bag and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up and against his car. She wrapped her legs around his waist and responded hungrily to his frantic kisses. "I've hated fighting with you," he said. "Every second I just wanted to take you and do things to you."

He was doing things to her right now. The car park was at the moment empty but anyone could come by and see them in a passionate embrace, his hands roaming freely across her body, groping her breasts. "I want you," he said thickly, and she knew he was hard.

"Not here," she said weakly, because she wanted him just as badly. It was like the time they'd had to spend the day working with each other but not being able to touch, only more so, because their hunger for one another was being fuelled by the loneliness and bitterness that had enveloped them both. "Oh, God, Jack," she cried out when he undid the top buttons of her shirt and plunged his hand shamelessly under her bra, and she knew she'd let him do whatever he wanted.

He let go of her long enough to unlock his car and bundled her in. He went straight for her pants, unbuttoning and unzipping and freeing her of the garment in seconds. Before she could really comprehend what was happening, he was inside her, pumping her furiously, feeling like he couldn't get as far inside her as he wanted, being dimly aware it was going to take a while before he would shake the terrifying feeling of losing her.

He placed his hand over her mouth and watched her scream against it as she climaxed. He buried his head in her shoulder and started to cry when he came. "I thought I'd lost you," he sobbed. "I was so scared I'd never get to hold you again."

The depth of his emotions frightened her a little in their intensity – and exhilarated her. He must close to love her if the thought of losing her made him cry. "It's OK, I'm here," she said.

He raised his head so he could meet her eyes with his tear-stained ones. "I need you," he said. "I can't keep going on like this."

"I know. Just a little while longer. I promise." Because she couldn't exactly deny herself to him when he was so vulnerable, Gabrielle took the risk of someone seeing them cuddled up in the back of Jack's car and spent the next hour building him back up until he felt almost normal again.

The photographer Bianca had hired to follow him caught the whole thing.

* * *

A few days later, Gabrielle practically skipped into the ED, smiling as she went. Now that he was convinced it was only a few more weeks, Jack had returned to the adoring man he had started out as being – maybe even surpassing himself. She hadn't realized how much having to keep their relationship behind closed doors had ground him down over two months.

She was nervous about outing themselves but knew she was doing the right thing. And she wanted her parents to like him. She was pretty sure they would (so long as Jack kept his mouth shut about what he lovingly referred to as bullshit conservatism, which her father had a spades) but there was always that nervousness about your boyfriend meeting your parents. And they had been so fond of Steve. They hadn't been happy with the idea of her moving to Sydney, said long and loud that she was a country girl and should nurse at the local country hospital, conveniently forgetting that Steve had humiliated her into quitting said local country hospital.

She was surprised at how nervous she was, actually. Jack wasn't like the men back home. Of course he wasn't, he was, by his own admission, a through-and-through city boy. But it was more than that – he had the same degree as Steve but he was so much greater educated. She hoped he wouldn't give her parents an inferiority complex. But he'd never made her feel less than him in intelligence, even though she so clearly was.

Stop thinking about it, she told herself. It was only going to make her nervous. Think about Jack instead and how he was last night… and the expression on her face turned to infatuation.

It lasted thirty seconds until she realized that everyone was staring at her. She felt like she was a freak in a cage, the subject of the most scandalous piece of gossip that was ever invented. She briefly wondered if this was how Jack felt all the time, and then her heart plummeted, because she realized what it could only be about.

"Frank wants to talk to you," Charlotte said in a strained voice. She had been attempted to quell the gossiping for the last hour, knowing people weren't about the let go of something this juicy. Jack Quade and Gabrielle Jaeger caught in a very compromising position in the hospital staff carpark – not even being particularly discreet about it. It had been too dark for the photos to come out to well inside the car, but the ones from outside were perfectly clear and left no doubts as to what had happened next.

Someone (and Charlotte was willing to bet money to who) had gone to the effort of having one or both of them tracked. And hired a professional photographer too, you could tell these weren't someone's happy snaps. And then distributed there around the hospital, every floor, every ward. Not that you needed to go to the bother of distributing them, this kind of material could distribute themselves, but there was no such thing as being too careful when it came to trashing someone's reputation.

She was so upset for them and angry someone would do something so malicious. And she didn't even know what Bianca thought she would achieve by outing them. Her mentality was that Jack went through women like Kleenex and wouldn't want it known he was seeing Gabrielle, but she had actually done him a favour. Charlotte knew how unhappy he was with the situation – and she told everyone so. "He's absolutely devoted to her and it showed. I've seen him in love before but it wasn't like this. He hated having to keep it quiet, he's not very good at being able to hide it when he's in love."

"So… Gabrielle was the one who wanted to keep it quiet?" Bart asked.

"She was afraid what would happen to her reputation once it got linked to Jack's. I told her not to worry about it, a week of his devoted boyfriend thing and people will forget they ever thought of her as his latest conquest, but she was scared. I can't blame her and Jack couldn't either but she hated it just the same. He's going to be so much happier now things are out in the open."

"So he forced her hand?" Bart asked.

Charlotte glared at him. Ever since Jack's cheerful explanation of how he'd upset Gabrielle, Bart had been a little creeped out by him. You had to be perverted to say something like that to a colleague in Bart's mind. "If Jack was going to force her hand, he'd just leave. He wouldn't… I mean this is humiliating. This was what she was scared of times ten. Someone else has gone to the effort, someone who hates one of them that much and knew about them… or knew someone who knew." She trained her eyes on Dan, who had the decency to squirm. "I just hope she doesn't hate him for putting her in this position." It really had been indiscreet of Jack to let things go that far on hospital grounds, although a determined enough photographer (and Sydney was full of them, as Nicole Kidman had found out) would have gotten them eventually. But if she did hate him over it, well, Charlotte would make sure Bianca Frost took full responsibility for the consequences of her malicious actions.

In the office they shared, Frank directed Gabrielle to sit down. She was getting more and more nervous with each passing second. "Thought you should see these. Someone decided the two of you were a very photogenic couple, apparently." He pushed over a series of photos and Gabrielle gasped. It wasn't that you could see anything – thank god, it had been too dark in the car to make out anything but shadows – but being wrapped around him against his car with his hands all over her did not leave a lot to the imagination as to what happened next.

She paled. "Oh, God." When she'd felt all eyes on her, she'd assumed she and Jack had been outed, probably by Bianca. But this… this was disgusting. This was humiliating. This told the world that she was quite happy to be fucked in the back of someone's car, and not just anyone, a surgeon with a particularly foul reputation about women.

"Do I want to know what you were doing on hospital grounds?" Frank asked.

"I – we'd had a fight and made up and things got out of hand." Her hands started shaking. Everyone in the hospital would have seen these by now and they must all be thinking the same thing; Gabrielle Jaeger, Jack Quade's newest conquest. And in the back of his car, too. Who would do something like this?

She couldn't help but remember how cheerful Jack had been the last few days, how vulnerable he'd been over their relationship being a secret, how determined he had been to have it out in the open. But… but… she'd already agreed just a few more weeks…

Could Jack have been so disillusioned with her string of broken promises about going public that he decided to force her hand? But… she had approached him that day – had he hired someone to follow her until she did? Had he banked on her seeking to reconcile with her?

"I have to go home," she said. She was shaking like a leaf. "I can't – face them."

"You will do no such thing if you ever want to hold your head up in this hospital again. You think running away is going to stop anyone calling you a whore?" His voice was harsh but she knew he was right. "I've got Vincent breaking it to Jack, he may be able to restrain that boy's temper."

Gabrielle laughed bitterly. "It was probably Jack who did it. He hated keeping it quiet and didn't trust me when I said a few more weeks."

Frank looked at her strangely. Did she really think Jack was capable of such a thing or was she just hysterical with the knowledge her reputation had gone from sterling to mud in a matter of hours? Jack had a lot of flaws but humiliating someone he cared about to get his own way was not one of them. The only question was, who hated either of them enough to go to all this trouble. "Jack will be down as soon as he can," he said, choosing to overlook her comment about Jack being responsible. That was something she would have to hash out with him. "You can stay here until he gets here."

"Poor girl," Cate said sympathetically when Frank emerged from the office and started yelling orders in a particularly cranky way. She had heard it in the cafeteria getting her morning coffee, although she hadn't seen the photos until an hour later. She had felt guilty for viewing the compromising photos of her boss, but it was one of those things you couldn't not do, it was too scandalous to pass up. "Whoever did it should probably leave town." Jack's temper when it came to the women he cared about was notorious. She grinned at a still-squirming Dan. "Do you remember the time he and Nelson got into a punch-up in the parking lot?"

"I thought Frank was going to fire all three of them," Dan said, laughing. "I think the two of them clashed over Terri from day one then were determined not to back down from that opinion."

"Is that why they didn't like each other?" Erica asked. "I thought it was over Deanna."

Charlotte couldn't help herself. The consequences of Jack's poor judgment in women was just too good not to share. "No, Nelson had a crush on one of the old NUMs and took it very personally when she got involved with Jack. Keep in mind, Jack's actually a lot more mature than he was a few years ago and he used to goad Nelson, and he's not a man you should goad. It was like watching two alpha males on a wildlife documentary. So long as you didn't get too close."

And so the gossip mill on Jack, which he had been doing his best to cool down the last four months, cranked up again.

An hour later Jack was finally able to get down to the ED. Vincent had physically blocked his path until he saw the red-hot desire for retribution fade from his eyes to be replaced by concern for Gabrielle. Vincent loathed Bianca as much as anyone else who had worked out she was the culprit (like it was hard, she had this irrational hatred of him that made Vincent wonder if Jack had slept with her and forgotten about her – Bianca didn't seem like the type of woman who took an insult like that well) but beating her into a bloody pulp like Vincent was sure he was capable of (he knew Jack was just as capable of beating up a woman as he was a man who threatened a woman he cared about) was not going to achieve anything but have him fired and charged with assault.

And he cared about Gabrielle. That was so obvious, just from the way he'd paced around the surgeon's lounge like a caged animal, determined to break Bianca's neck and take great pleasure out of it. And it was more obvious in the way his eyes had softened when Vincent had coaxed him into talking about her. Vincent hadn't known Jack that well when he'd been with Terri, it had taken them a while to become friends, but instinct told him he hadn't felt this way about her.

He raced down to the ED and was greeted by a sudden drop in the noise level. He'd known it was coming, he'd been the subject of gossip too many times, but it was still awful. He knew everyone had seen those photos – the were too scandalous for people to decline to look. And he was grateful you couldn't really see anything. But all the same Gabrielle was humiliated.

He could take it. After your ex told everyone who would listen that she'd left you because she'd walked in on you and another guy, being caught publicly making out with a consenting adult woman was nothing special. But Gabrielle… she had worked so hard to establish a sterling reputation and now that was ruined. He'd heard the whispers. Conquest had been the kindest word. Stupid whore who lets herself be fucked in the back of a car had been a common sentiment.

The entire ED staff flinched collectively as the sound of glass breaking as Gabrielle threw her lolly jar at Jack's head. It smashed against the door. "You bastard!" she screamed at him. "If you were that desperate you could have just told me. I'd rather have outed us a week ago than have this entire hospital refer to me as Jack Quade's whore." She had worked herself into a state for the last hour, wondering if maybe Jack wasn't coming, not realizing Vincent had to calm him down so he wouldn't go out wreaking his idea of vengeance.

Jack was shocked to realize she thought he had done this. "Gabby, I –" he went to hold her and she hit him.

"Don't touch me!" she screamed. "I never want you to touch me again! I hate you!"

The ED collectively flinched even harder to hear her say those words.

"I didn't do it!" he yelled back. He hadn't meant to yell but he needed to make himself heard over her. "I'd leave you before I did something like that. You know I was prepared to leave you if you didn't come through on your promise that after your parents… I love you and I would never do something like that to someone I love."

The three words completely sapped her of her anger. "You what?" she asked.

"I love you. I didn't realize how much until I saw those photos and – Bianca did it, I just know it. And I wanted to kill her for humiliating her and I wanted to kill Dan for telling her about us and I realized how much I loved you if I wanted to hurt people for hurting you."

Her whole body crumbled and in a second he had her in his arms and she was crying into his chest. "Jack, I'm so sorry. I should have known, should have known…"

"It's OK." He didn't have the heart to be angry with her. Maybe she should have known him better, but then, blinded by anger and humiliation as she had been, maybe he wouldn't have thought too clearly about it either. "I love you. I love you." He tilted her head so he could kiss her.

A few minutes later Frank barged in; they were alerted to his presence by the fact he stepped on the broken glass from the lolly jar that littered the floor near the door. They broke apart, and it was hard to say who looked more embarrassed, Jack and Gabrielle for being caught in such an intense kiss of Frank for having walked in on it. "Sorry, it went quiet for so long I thought you'd killed him."

Gabrielle looked embarrassed. Jack held her hand tightly. "Sorry, Frank," she said in a small voice.

"Quade, you're needed in here for the rest of the day. If you worked really hard, the day might just end at five." Which was Gabrielle's finish time. Which was Frank's way of saying they had suffered enough today, the least the deserved was to go home together. Arm in arm. With the whole ED to see and say later in Cougars that Gabrielle had this way of bringing out Jack's affectionate side.

"Thanks, Frank," Jack said.

An hour later Jack and Dan were both doing paperwork at the ED's main desk. "I'm spending a few days at Gabby's," he said with icy coldness that sent a chill down Dan's spine. "You don't want to be home when I go to pick up a few things."

"If that's the worst Dan gets away with, he's an incredibly lucky man," Cate mused, witnessing the exchange.

"I wouldn't thank luck so much as Gabrielle. She has a way of calming him down. Now he's got what he wanted, to have a girlfriend who's hand he can hold in public, I think we're going to see a New and Improved Jack Quade," Charlotte replied.

"Did you get my present?" Bianca asked in a sugary sweet voice that made Jack want to strangle her.

He'd already decided playing it cool was the best bet. "If you meant those disgusting photos, yes. You didn't need to waste all that money on a photographer. I would have told you if you'd asked."

Her smile faltered a little. She'd expected Jack to be playing the injured party, blathering on about to have sex with whoever he wished, whenever he wished, wherever he wished. She'd been so impressed with the photographer she'd paid him double. In the back of his car in the staff carpark. Could you get tackier than that?

Actually, you could. He'd been telling anyone who would listen that as tacky as sicking the paparazzi onto someone was, it was even tackier to sleep around while you were married. Either be faithful or be free. How he had found out that piece of information, she wasn't sure, but she was furious. "How is your newest whore going, anyway?"

Jack looked thoughtful for a second, as if he was trying to work out what she was talking about. "Can't say I have a whore, but if you mean my girlfriend, Gabrielle's fine. Actually, I've been meaning to thank you. You did me a favour. I'd been seeing her for over two months and wanted to go public but she was scared of having her reputation linked to mine – rightly so, I have to admit," he said in a tone that said, plain as day, he'd committed some indiscretions on the past but now he was with someone he loved enough to change for. "We were at an impasse and you forced her hand. Not really how I would have liked to have been outed but a favour nonetheless, so thankyou."

Bianca frowned, actually frowned. This was not going how she expected. She hadn't realized he actually cared about Gabrielle. But no – Jack didn't give a shit about anyone but himself. And here he was, thanking her for forcing their relationship out in the open so he could be the devoted boyfriend. "You think anyone's going to forget what a womanizing piece of shit you are?"

She was slipping. Once it had been cutting references to his sexual history in such a way that he couldn't defend himself. Now it was womanizing piece of shit. She was angry because she was on the defensive. "I think people can forget a lot after a few months of seeing the boyfriend they wished they had. Considerate, affectionate, faithful – you should know, Bianca," he added with venomous sweetness.

"I know you're nothing but some loser anorexic who spends more time sleeping around than learning how to be a good doctor," she hissed, and for a moment the mask completely dropped and there it was, utter hatred. She hated him for some reason he couldn't understand. He had no memory of meeting her before that car accident that had claimed the life of a husband and earned his wife a guilty conscience for the rest of her life.

The anorexic thing floored him. Had she gotten bored of making things up about his sex life and moved onto other arenas of his life? "I have no idea what you're talking about," he hissed back. "Why don't you go ask my girlfriend how much I enjoy cooking and eating. I have never had an issue with my weight…"

His voice trailed off as he realised what she was talking about. He stared at her. She was different, she'd had work done on her face. Not as plain as she used to be. But now he remembered exactly who she was and why she hated him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Warning, goes into Jack's sexual abuse. And as far as my replaying of Cate's breakdown went - I thought it could be handled much classier with a lot of so-called friends doing nothing when she needed them. I had rewritten this storyline when I was a C/J shipper and decided to incorporate that into this fic. I think Alex Davies deserved better than what she got for most of s9, 10 and 11.**

_Sixteen years of Stella's physical and emotional abuse had ground down any degree of confidence he may have had about his looks or his character and made it hard for him to allow anyone to touch him. She hated him with a passion, hated her husband's constant infidelities but lack the strength to leave him. So Jack became a convenient outlet for her anger at how life hadn't given her what she wanted._

_She constantly badmouthed his mother, Carla, and told him at every opportunity that the apple never fell far from the tree and Jack was going to end up a pathetic slut just like his mother. He knew her words came from bitterness but it was hard not to think there was some truth to it. Was there something in him that made him unlovable? _

_And if Stella had left any security in his ability to be loved, any faith in the believe that touch could be pleasurable, Patrick Wesley had finished it off. When the right trigger brought the memories crashing down on him, Jack could still remember how badly being raped had hurt, and that didn't even go into how humiliating the experience had been, how deeply it had made him question his heterosexuality. When you had someone forcing themselves onto you, telling them you'd been begging for it, then it was easy to wonder if maybe you had._

_At sixteen he was emancipated and desperate to be loved and prove himself sexually but completely lacking any belief in his ability to be loved. His intelligence he was sure of but his lovability… His first girlfriend had started as a friend through the university's mentoring program and understood, or thought she understood – Jack had never told anyone about Patrick. She coaxed him through physical intimacy by first getting into his mind and creating the emotional intimacy he needed before anything else._

_Girlfriend number two had a lazier way around Jack's intimacy issues; speed. He was aware more than most how idiotic it was for him to be substituting a genuine need for therapy with illicit drugs. But it was perfect for him. It made him feel invincible, more sociable, more mellow (even though it was a stimulant) and boosted his sex drive. It also acted as an appetite suppressant and he got down to sixty-five kilograms before fate intervened. Sixty-five kilograms is not a lot when you're a hundred and ninety centimeters. Bianca should have known the difference between weight loss from an eating disorder and weight loss from a drug problem, but that was where she got the idea he was anorexic._

_When he was high, he became reckless. He'd lied to Gabrielle about being careful about sex. He'd been careful since he was eighteen but before that – it was hard to think about condoms when drugs were making you feel horny and invincible at the same time. In one year he'd been treated for Chlamydia twice and Gonorrhea once. He slept around with complete abandon. About the only thing he put any thought into was being good at it. He wanted to be great at sex. He _needed_ to know the woman he was with was having a great time._

_He blacked out a lot and nearly ten years later there were holes in his memory of getting drunk and high or stoned and going out to score. Which led to his housemate (it wasn't a house exactly, whatever they called on-site accommodation, his scholarship had included board and a small stipend, thank god) hiding a camera in his room to make a point about the things Jack did where he'd have no recollection of doing them the next morning._

_When he was eighteen, Bianca Miller was twenty-one and already had a reputation as a sexual predator and ball-breaker. What she wanted, she went after. And she wanted Jack. He was three years younger than her but in the same year as her and had a reputation for absolute brilliance – even with the drugs slowing him down. She thought they could make a very good team and she intended in ingratiating herself into his life as his girlfriend._

_She'd had no intention of sleeping with him on their first meeting. Her plan had been to make him fall in love with her mind and make him desperate to have her so she'd have all the power. She hadn't banked on Jack's determination to get laid and how seductive he could be. You wouldn't think someone who looked as worn-out as he did would know much about sex, but he only had to touch a woman if he was determined enough to have her and…_

_She had fully expected him to call her the next day. He hadn't. Two days after that, she had gone up to him in the tavern and started talking to him, but he had no idea who she was. He'd figured, naturally, that he'd slept with her but that didn't help to remember her. He'd apologized and gone back to his book, like it was a small, forgivable slight._

_She tracked him down, seething with fury, six weeks later to tell him she was pregnant. He still didn't remember her but told her honestly that he was in no position to be a father. He would support her financially if she insisted on going through with it but –_

_She'd gone completely berserk, attacked him and needed to be pulled off him. That. Had. Not. Been. Her. Plan. _Her_ parents had married over the same thing (so had Jack's father and step-mother and he'd seen how well _that_ had turned out, which was why he wasn't having a bar of it), did he think she wasn't good enough for him? _

_She got it now. She was just his latest conquest. She, Bianca Miller, very intelligent and on her way to being a very successful doctor, wasn't good enough for this anorexic piece of shit who was happy to use her to satisfy his lust then discard her._

_She miscarried the next day and blamed him for it. Then she went down to the dean's office and cried rape._

_Even without the video, the accusation wouldn't have held water. It was a case of he said, she said and it rarely goes in favour of the woman in those circumstances. The tape just made it easier for Jack to defend herself. She had gone white with humiliation and rage to see it. The look in her eyes had frightened him. This was a woman convinced she had been deeply wronged and would stop at nothing to extract what she considered revenge._

_The funny thing was, the incident had been a turning point for him. The dean, who knew a little about the unhappy background that had brought Jack to this point, was sympathetic towards him. But Jack's was a name that was going around campus as a guy to avoid because of the way he used women, and on top of that were the constant treatments for STDs and the fact several of his professors had said he looked like he was on something a lot of the time – at least, when he wasn't showing up drunk. It was such a pity, because if he was as bright as he was when he was high or drunk… and more to the point, it was unethical to be letting a future doctor through under those circumstances, no matter how bright he may be._

_The dean invoked Jack's morality clause. The university offered Jack's scholarship to attract the best minds of the country – but it came with a condition of morality, same in the good old days of the Hayes code in Hollywood. If Jack had been a little more with it – or a little less terrified of losing his scholarship – he would have realized the morality clause couldn't actually be invoked unless he'd done something that was on his permanent record. STDs and the feeling someone _might_ be on drugs didn't cut it. But it frightened Jack enough to agree to go into detox and submit to regular drug and STD tests._

_It gave him a lot of time to think while sober. And he didn't like himself for what he'd done. He hadn't forced any woman to have sex with him, he knew that, but he couldn't help but wonder if he had said something to Bianca to get her into bed, the promise of a date, a relationship? He strained his memory but there was so many blanks..._

_He hadn't forced anyone but he'd been pretty lousy to some of the women he'd taken to bed. And at the end of the day, did that make him so much better than Patrick? A seducer, a user…_

_He was always aware of his behaviour around women after that. Sleeping with Charlotte rattled him deeply, no matter how many times he told himself they were both pretty drunk. Maybe Tara dying had been karmic retribution._

_It had been eight years since Bianca Miller, and in time he had forgotten about her. Until she looked at him in absolute hate and called him an anorexic piece of shit and he remembered who she was and what he had done to earn her hate…_

He told Gabrielle everything but Patrick. Patrick was too shameful to tell even to someone he loved. He was shaking when he told her and couldn't meet her eyes in case he'd see that she no longer cared for him the way she had. "I didn't mean to hurt her," he said. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I was a prick, I know that, but I wanted to be loved and I confused sex with love and drugs made me feel like I was loveable."

He was crying now and she took him in his arms. She wasn't exactly surprised by Jack's story. She had sensed there was a darkness in his life that he didn't talk about. "Poor baby," she said. She wished she could love him enough to envelope him and make him feel safe and good about himself like that bitch of a stepmother should have done in the first place. "Jack, listen to me. I know you, OK? And I love you because of what I know about you. And I know you have so much integrity, so much respect for women… whatever's happened in the past has happened, you can only be a good person today." She felt his whole body relax and his tears subside in the face of her soothing presence. Good. The poor guy. Her heart went out to him. To have known only pain and abuse growing up where there should have been love and support – it said a lot about him that he functioned as well as he did, that he'd managed to overcome his attitude towards sex and women to be someone who Gabrielle could love.

And now Bianca was throwing his past behaviour back in his face, behaviour that she had to take some responsibility for. Jack could not have been the only guy to screw her over but he was the only one she was gunning for. He hadn't raped her and there was no crime in not calling someone the next day. It was certainly a hell of a lot more immoral to be playing around on your husband. But women like Bianca tended to be hypocrites like that.

She located Bianca the next day. She'd forced herself to watch the tape so she'd know exactly what was on it – and it made Bianca's photos look like the paintings of trees and flowers on the walls of the children's ward. Gabrielle had given up halfway through, not able to watch anymore. And Jack hadn't been exaggerating about his weight, either.

"Well look if it isn't Jack's newest whore," Bianca said when she saw Gabrielle.

"You don't want to talk about Jack's whores with me, Bianca," Gabrielle said in a pleasant tone that had such an edge Gabrielle saw fear in her eyes. It was the same look people got when being confronted by her family's pet Rottweiler. Bianca really hadn't been that bright. She had to have known there was a possibility Jack still had the tape – or at least had access to it. Surely she had suspected it could still be floating around to be used against her? Had she hated Jack that much she'd gunned for him anyway? "Why don't we have a chat in private."

"I take it Jack told you what he id to me?" Bianca hissed when they were in private.

"Yeah, he did."

"And you're still with him? God, I've heard of desperate, but that's just pathetic."

"I'd be careful what you say about me or Jack in the future, Bianca," Gabrielle said mildly. "You never know what we'll be forced to bring up to ruin your credibility." She went white. Gabrielle hated having to do this but she knew it was the only way they were going to get Bianca off their case – and so long as she was with Jack, she was almost as big a target for her hatred as Jack was. "If you had bothered to learn anything about him, you'd realize how much he's changed and how much responsibility he takes for his actions. Which is a hell of a lot more than you did. He didn't rape you but you couldn't accept he wasn't interested in you."

"He could have used a condom."

"You could have made him." God, this conversation was making her sick. Not just the content of it but the fact it was about a man she loved. Even knowing he had changed and took responsibility for his actions, it didn't make it any less seedy. "For what it's worth, he's incredibly sorry. I know you're determined to see the worst in him but he'd take it back if there was anyway he could. I couldn't love him if I didn't know how much integrity he has, and I will not let you take your anger out on him when you should be taking responsibility for your actions. So this is how it's going to work." She handed over a copy of the tape. "This, obviously, is not our only copy. You back off or we will upload this onto the net and email it to everyone in this hospital and every hospital in Sydney." See how well she was accepted in professional circles after _that_.

Bianca turned a fascinating shade of green. Gabrielle wished everyone could witness this moment but of course the only way this was going to work was if only the three of them knew _why_ she had just turned such a fascinating shade of green. "You forget your precious boyfriend is on that tape," she spluttered.

"Even if Jack had any reputation left to care about, you and I both know the double standard here. The guy's a stud in this kind of situation, the girl is a slut. Think about it; it wouldn't matter if you were the greatest surgeon who ever lived, no-one would be able to look at you without seeing you in bed with him. Add to the fact you cried rape when he didn't call you, how much credibility to you think you'll have? How sympathetic will it make _him_ look?"

Bianca looked at Gabrielle with even colder hate than she had treated Jack to. She had been out maneuvered by this plain, unsophisticated nurse. She, Bianca Frost, gotten the better of by someone like Gabrielle Jaeger. A woman who was already stilling gossiping tongues with how devoted Jack clearly was to her. He had discarded her and forgotten about her and chosen to be devoted to _Gabrielle_?

But there wasn't a lot she could do and they both knew it. She snatched the disc away as if taking it from Gabrielle's hands could eliminate its existence. She knew Gabrielle was telling the truth when she said there were copies. She knew Gabrielle was right that if this ever got out, her reputation would be ruined. Not only to be caught out with something like that, but with Jack Quade, who everyone knew she hated. Well, that was funny, she could hear people saying, turns out she was just a vengeful slut. That she had the right to be vengeful would be lost on them. "Fine," she said through gritted teeth. "Get the hell out of my office."

"With pleasure," Gabrielle said just as grimly. "And remember, Bianca, no harassing us, no badmouthing us, no doing anything that would make us look the slightest bit bad. Is that understood." Bianca nodded. "Then we have a deal," she said, and walked out of Bianca's office with as much dignity as she could muster given she had just blackmailed someone with a sex tape starring her boyfriend.

A few days later, Vincent came up to her. "OK, what did you do or say to Bianca that's made her completely back off? I asked her and she looked like she would quite happily tear both of you to pieces but mumbled something about you not being worth her time. You must have _something_ good on her." And Vincent was dying to know. He disliked Bianca heartily, not just because of her hatred of Jack but for her arrogance, the way she talked down to everyone who she didn't consider to be on her level (which was most people), the way she flaunted her infidelity in a way that made Richard Craig look like he had integrity, and if Gabrielle and Jack had something on her, he wanted in.

"I've been known to act like a Rottweiler when it comes to the people I care about," Gabrielle semi-lied. "Women like her always back down when threatened."

Vincent laughed. "God, I would have liked to have seen that." Bianca Frost, gotten the better of someone she considered beneath her for her lesser intelligence, sophistication and attractiveness. Bianca was never going to understand that whatever Gabrielle lacked in what Bianca considered to be vital attributes she made up for in loyalty, love and integrity. God, no wonder Jack was crazy about her.

"You're really good for him," Vincent said. "I didn't really know him when he was with Terri but I knew Terri and they were never going to be happy together." It hadn't even just been about Mitch, which Jack was convinced to this day had been the main culprit. It had been the kind of woman Terri was, Jack was always going to be too full-on for her. "But you really get him. I was watching the two of you yesterday and you can see him relax whenever you're around him. He's happier in general and he just perks up when he's with you. I've never seen him like this."

Impulsively, Gabrielle hugged Vincent. "Thankyou, I really need to hear that," she said. "I get so insecure sometimes when people wonder what he sees in me, like I'm not pretty enough or smart enough for him."

"The fact is, Gabrielle, you have a lot of prettier, smarter women writhing in jealousy because they can't work out what it is you have over them and Jillian Henderson is the leader of the pack. The fact is, she's just not a very nice person but it's easier for her to make fun of you than it is face up to that." His face crinkled in puzzlement. "And I don't understand where you got this idea about not being attractive, either. OK, so you're not about to be a rival for Jennifer Hawkins but you're hardly unattractive."

Gabrielle smiled ruefully. Jack said something similar all the time. "If you knew my ex, you'd understand," she said, and Vincent wondered how much of Jack's devotion it was going to take to overcome whatever self-esteem issues she had.

* * *

"So, which of those hot guys is single?"

So asked Jo Henderson to her friend Cate McMasters. Jo had just arrived back in Sydney after travelling for a long time, and Cate had welcomed her with open arms. And naturally the first thing on Jo's mind was hooking up with someone, she had always been boy-crazy. "Um... Dan is but Ricki's kind of protective of him, he just got out of something with a married woman. Sean and Vincent are both single as far as I know. And absolutely stay away from Jack. Gabrielle won't like it."

Jo laughed. "I'm sure I can go toe-to-toe with her," she said. Jealous girlfriends were something she had long learnt how to handle.

"Trust me on this one. Jack's absolutely devoted to her. She's got some issues with infidelity, her ex cheated on her or something, and he indulges her on it. You come onto him and you'll have an enemy for life."

"Wow. Why would he do that? I mean, there's plenty of prettier women out there, he could have his pick. Why would he put up with jealousy and insecurity?"

Cate shrugged. "Beats me, but he does. I've never seen Jack like this about anyone." They had been together publicly for a month now and people thought they were adorable together. He really did brighten whenever she was around and he was a lot happier in general for it.

"It must be nice to have someone care about you like that."

Cate didn't reply. In truth, it had been a while since anyone had cared about her like that – if there had been anyone at all. Scott, Mac, Vincent – all men who had used her when they wanted to get laid then lost interest in her shortly after. She could still remember how humiliated she had felt when she'd realized how hung up Vincent still was on Charlotte. She was always falling for men who used her to get over exes.

She watched Jack with Gabrielle. She was sitting in his lap, looking like she could rule the world from there. She was a woman loved and a woman secure in that love. Cate saw a lot of them together, everyone in the ED did, he was always finding excuses to be there (Cate was pretty sure Vincent and Frank were in cahoots to make sure every situation that needed a trauma surgeon was thrown Jack's way) and truth be told, sometimes it made her so jealous to see them. It was little things like the way he could be engrossed in a book but look up immediately when she entered the tea room or the way he was always running his fingers along her arms without thinking about it, he just took unconscious pleasure from touching her.

She knew none of her exes had ever taken unconscious pleasure from touching her. Sure, they'd been hot for her, wanted to sleep with her, but not just touch her.

And then it didn't help how many people had expressed surprise that Jack had hooked up with Gabrielle, especially given his history with gorgeous, sophisticated women like Jillian Henderson. "Always thought you and he would end up together," had been a common sentiment. Cate had been surprised at first, but the explanation was always the same; their palliness, his fondness for her, she was pretty and he seemed to have a thing for blonds…

They had been pally, that was true. What she had liked about Jack was he'd never tried to hit on her. And he'd always been there for her when she got her heart broken. But she'd never thought about getting involved with him until people kept bringing it up and she saw Jack in a new light, especially given his devotion to Gabrielle. After all, Jack was intelligent, caring, considerate, easy on the eyes…

She couldn't help but wonder if something might have happened in different circumstances, maybe if he hadn't gotten involved with Deanna. She would have liked a boyfriend like Jack. She couldn't help feel a little jealousy to see them together.

"If I didn't know better," Jo interrupted her thoughts, "I'd say you were a bit sweet on him."

Cate found herself blushing to her roots. Jo had unerring instinct when it came to sexual vibes and romantic feelings. "Who wouldn't want to be with someone like him?" she retorted. "When was the last time you saw someone so devoted to their girlfriend?"

"True," Jo agreed, and despite Cate's warning, she tried to get Jack's attention focused on the fact he had a sexy, fun nurse right in front of him, far sexier and more fun than the one sitting in his lap…

… "I think Jo's watching us," Jack whispered in her ear. He'd had a few too many or he wouldn't have said it; usually he had the good sense not to throw in Gabrielle's face that other women found him attractive.

For example, he had kept it quiet whenever someone hit on him. And it was happening with increasing frequency. The fact he had turned from Inconsiderate User of Women to Devoted Boyfriend seemingly overnight made a lot of women very interested in having such a Devoted Boyfriend. It vaguely amused Jack, who had never understood the mentality of boyfriend and girlfriend stealing; why would you want anyone who could be inveigled to cheat on their _partner_, that only meant they were likely to cheat on _you_. But he knew Gabrielle wouldn't find it as amusing, she'd just find it threatening.

It frustrated him sometimes that she was so insecure but because he knew where it came from, he tolerated it, maybe even indulged her more than he should. After all, he had plenty of flaws when it came to relationships himself and she overlooked them, it would be hypocritical not to overlook that one little flaw.

He felt Gabrielle stiffen in his arms and very indiscreetly look over in Jo and Cate's direction. Sure enough, Jo was looking at them – no, looking at Jack – with an expression on her face that made it clear she was interested in him. Jo looked away quickly. Jack realized too late he shouldn't have said anything. "Do you want to go home?" he asked.

She laughed falsely. "So we can indulge in my stupidity a bit more?" she asked. "Forget about it. Let Jo look. It's the most she's going to get."

He nuzzled her neck. He knew she was putting on a brave face, and he loved her for it. Maybe this was her finally accepting, intellectually at least, that women could look all the wanted but if they tried anything else, they were going to get turned down flat.

He was too busy paying Gabrielle attention to realize Cate was watching them. Or rather, watching _him_.

* * *

"Jack, you need to talk to Cate."

"You know, Gabby, I'm a little concerned you're too distracted for sex because you're thinking about another woman," Jack quipped. "And I don't think Cate swings that way, either."

She responded by jabbing her elbow into his ribs. "I'm serious. I'm worried about her and she doesn't respond well to me as her boss. I was hoping she might respond better to you as her friend."

Jack frowned. Everyone knew Cate had been on a downward spiral ever since Jo had showed up. He didn't like Jo. It wasn't just that she didn't respect his relationship, it was that she didn't respect anyone's relationship or personal space. Thank god, she had moved onto harassing Sean to go out with her now.

But Cate, for whatever reason, was going along for Jo's ride, but she lacked the street smarts or tolerance to drugs and alcohol to keep up with Jo. Jack knew from experience that when you went down that path of drugs and sex at your own pace, you developed some semblance of control over it even though it looked to outsiders that you were keeping it together by sheer chance. There was still an element of out-of-control-ness to it, but there was more control than it seemed to outsider. But when you rushed headlong into it and tried keeping up with a seasoned veteran, well, things were only going to end badly.

He felt bad, because they had been good friends once, but he had let his relationship with Gabrielle take priority, and all other relationships, including his with Rebecca, had taken a backseat. He knew a big part of his appeal to Cate was that he'd never treated her like a sexual being and that his only interest in her was platonic. Not, of course, that he hadn't had his thoughts about her – the girl was gorgeous, smart and a good friend – but for some reason, they had never gone down that road. Maybe because she was Vincent's ex and Jack didn't particularly care to get involved with another of Vincent's exes. It had taken him long enough to earn back the older surgeon's liking and trust after Charlotte.

But then, everyone knew Charlotte was Vincent's One True Love, and that had doomed his relationship with Cate from the start. Jack had understood that, and it was why he'd been such a comfort to Cate. He'd always been a comfort to her when she'd needed a friend, and he felt guilty now for maybe not having been there for her when she needed him. Maybe if he'd been paying more attention some of the influence Jo now had on her would have been Jack's influence.

"I'll talk to her," he promised. His opportunity came a few days later when they were the first in to Cougars after the day's shift had finished. Gabrielle was running a little late and Jo was nowhere to be seen – probably off hassling Sean to take her to dinner – which gave him time alone with Cate. "Anything you want to talk about?" he asked.

Cate looked at him warily. She'd had a few drinks – actually, a few drinks too many – and she hadn't been able to lose the idea of being with Jack. She felt horrible every time she thought of it, because Gabrielle was a wonderful boss, but she kept returning to the idea of being with him, of having someone who was devoted to her the way Jack was to Gabrielle, not someone who only wanted to sleep with her to forget about the women they really wanted to be with. "Why do you ask?"

"Look, I know I haven't been a great friend lately and I'm sorry about that. I've always hated when people stop paying attention to their friends because they started seeing someone and here I am, doing the same."

It was like twisting the knife. Not only was he a great boyfriend, he felt guilty because he hadn't been the greatest friend during his budding relationship. "I've known much worse people about that," she said. Hell, Jo had bailed on her to pester Sean to take her out for drinks, and it was obvious he had no interest in her. She'd rather chase someone who had turned her down a dozen times then keep her so-called best friend happy.

She had thought she was glad to have Jo back in her life, but the more Jo was around, the more she realized just how selfish she was. Everything from always forgetting to give back Cate's only key to dragging her out for drinks when Cate had pleaded she had an early start the next morning. She knew Gabrielle was increasingly unimpressed with her but whenever Jo focused those puppy-dog eyes on her, she found it impossible to say no.

Jack could tell Cate's thoughts were pensive, and he wondered if she was thinking about what a bad influence Jo was on her. Impulsively, he grabbed her hand. "Look, you're not alone," he said. "Why don't we spend the day together sometime soon? It's Bec's birthday coming up and I'm really bad about buying gifts for women, I could do with some advice."

Cate laughed at that. She had seen the stunning pearl pendant he had bought Gabrielle for her birthday. Every woman in the ED (and most of them in the rest of the hospital) had been green with jealousy. Jack had exquisite taste when it came to buying gifts for women. But it was nice he had tried to come up with something. "You're a really great friend, Jack," she said drunkenly.

"I do my best," he said modestly, hoping this meant she was willing to open up to him.

"Your best is a damn sight better than anyone else's," she replied. She thought about how sweet he was as a friend and how sweet he was as a boyfriend and how much she wanted a boyfriend like him and how Gabrielle was a royal idiot to be insecure about him and –

He was too shocked to do anything for the first few seconds when she kissed him. And, God help him, he kissed her back for one of those seconds. And in singularly awful timing, Gabrielle chose that second to walk in.

He pushed her away violently. "What the hell was that about?" he yelled. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and hadn't felt such a foul taste in his mouth since Patrick Wesley had last forced him into a blowjob as an alternative to being raped. Cate didn't know that particular detail, of course, but the look on his face was enough.

"I'm sorry," she babbled. "I was jealous of what you guys have and I missed you and…"

Jack stared at her. She'd _missed_ him so he'd _kissed_ him? He felt incredibly dirty. He knew he had nothing to feel guilty about, she had kissed him and even if he had kissed her back, come on, she was a close and old friend and these things happened. It wasn't like he had kissed her back for long. "Are you _insane_? You don't kiss someone in a relationship because you miss them! God, you're as much of a slut as Bianca."

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. There was a certain difference between kissing someone because you were lonely and on a spiral of self-destruction (he had done plenty worse for the same reason) and sleeping around out of a sense of entitlement. But he was pissed off that she'd done it and wanted to lay into her.

She started to cry in earnest now, and his heart softened. Poor girl, she must be in a really lousy place if she thought kissing him was a clever idea. He started to tell her it was OK until, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gabrielle in the doorway. Looking very pissed. Everything was definitely not OK.

He chased after her. "Hey! I didn't do anything!" he yelled.

"I saw you kiss her, Jack. "

"She kissed me!"

"You weren't exactly pushing her away! God, Jack, I heard all this talk about the two of you and I was determined not to believe it because I know you're mates but – God, have you been after her all along?"

"Look, I'm sorry, OK! I'm sorry I find other women attractive. I'm sorry when Cate kissed me, it was a few seconds before I pushed her away. Jesus Christ, Gabby, are you going to persecute me because the closest I ever came to infidelity was letting a close friend kiss me?"

"Go to hell, Steve."

Now they were on terms he understood. He caught up with her and spun her around so she was facing him. "This has gone on long enough," he said. "I'm sorry I let Cate kiss me. But letting a good friend in trouble kissing me is a hell of a difference to screwing your best mate. I. Am. Not. Steve. I can't keep living like this. I can't keep censoring everything I do and say because I'm afraid you'll get insecure. I love you, but I can't keep living like this."

She was crying in his arms now. "I will do whatever it takes to make you trust me. I'll go to couple's therapy if that's what you want. But I can't keep living like this."

"I know," she sobbed. "I know." And he held her.

* * *

"Jack, I'm so sorry –" Cate began the next day.

Jack held out his hand in a stop motion. He didn't even look up from his medical journal. "I've already reported you for sexual misconduct. You touch me and I'll have you charged."

There was a coldness in his voice that made Cate shiver. This was a man who had once been a close friend, who had held her in his arms and let her cry about Vincent breaking her heart. "I didn't mean to –" she tried again.

He looked up from his magazine. "Didn't mean to what exactly? Make my girlfriend think I was playing around on her? Waste a night trying to comfort her?"

"She shouldn't have been so insecure in the first place," Cate offered as her best defense, and she knew it was the wrong one, because Jack looked at her coldly.

"She has tolerated far more of my hangups than I have of hers. And that's not even the point. You knew, Cate, how she feels about other women hitting on me. And you did it all the same. Has she been such a lousy boss and human being that you felt you had to do that?"

"I was jealous," she admitted. "And it's no-one else's fault but my own. I saw what you had together and I wanted it – because I never had the strength or good judgment to ask it for myself. I knew Vincent, Mac, Scott only wanted one thing from me and I gave it to them thinking maybe it would make them love me the way you love Gabrielle."

"Cate…" He didn't touch her but he understood now what had possessed her to make a move on someone she knew was taken. "You're a good mate. But I will never care about you more than that, I will never love you the way I love Gabby." She nodded. "You need help. I know a few councilors – "

"Anything," she agreed. "Jack, I don't want to keep living like this."

His heart finally broke for her. He leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. "I will always be here for you as a friend," he said.

From outside the door, Gabrielle listened. And she finally understood what made Jack Jack. He was very Russian in that way. When he took the trouble to love someone, he loved them absolutely and completely. He loved Cate with as much passion and loyalty as he loved Gabrielle… but in different ways. Emotionally, sexually and romantically, Jack belonged to her and only to her.

She finally understood.

* * *

"So, there I am, crapping on about how we should have weighed the bullet or something, when I was just as responsible as Vincent for the fragments being in there, not realizing he's giving me the filthiest look – I don't think I could have stuck more foot in it better for my first registrar patient if I'd tried."

Sean laughed. "I think the time you called Mike in the middle of the night then proceeded to bag him thinking he was someone else was pretty good," he said. "Mate, you know I love you, but I've never met anyone with such a penchant for foot-in-mouth disease."

"You should meet Rebecca," Gabrielle confided, sipping her wine. "Charlotte says she's like Jack a few years ago – whatever thought pops into her head, she'll say it. It makes me glad I didn't know Jack a few years ago."

"At least with someone like that, you always know they're being honest," Zoe offered. The four of them had taken to casual double-dates of late. Since Charlotte had gone on maternity leave and Frank had decided to go traipsing off to Europe and being all in-love, responsibility for the ED had largely fallen to Zoe, which meant she spent a lot of time liasing with Gabrielle. The two women got on well, professionally and personally, and since Sean and Jack got on fairly well as well it had been natural to socialize as a foursome. So far, Jack and Gabrielle were the only ones to know about Zoe and Sean being together.

Gabrielle laughed ruefully. "You might reconsider that when you know your boyfriend's sister thinks of you as the bitch who was too ashamed to take their relationship. It's been three months and she won't let it go."

"I think it's kind of sweet. At least you know that your siblings care about you enough to badmouth the people who hurt them," Zoe said, and everyone knew she was thinking of her own brother. Jack noticed the way Sean squeezed her hand slightly. That was always a good indication of true love, those little touches when your loved one is upset about someone… and knowing when your loved one is upset about something.

"Yeah, his brother hit on me when Jack took me to meet his family. In front of his wife."

Zoe clapped her hand over her mouth, shocked. "What did you do?" she asked.

"Asked if it was a Quade thing to publicly humiliate your wife. I don't think we'll be invited back."

Zoe started to laugh. "I'm sorry Jack, but sometimes I don't understand why you turned out as well as you did."

Jack smiled ruefully. "You're not the first person to say that. I guess some people just don't know how to be decent human beings."

"Amen to that. Speaking of which, I heard Richard Craig's been busted screwing around again. You'd think a sexual harassment lawsuit would make you think about doing it again."

Jack made a face. "Terri couldn't stand him. She was friends with his daughter and there was some kind of history there but she refused to have anything to do with him. It was actually kind of funny 'cos she was tiny but Richard was terrified of her and wouldn't come to the ED except under duress. It was like with Gabby and Bianca except he was twice her size."

"Why does it not surprise me that this Terri woman was strong? You seem to have a knack for attracting them, Jack," Sean said.

"That's 'cos he needs someone to keep him in line," Gabrielle offered. "He's so bloody stubborn." This earned laughter from Zoe and Sean and led onto other things and a thoroughly enjoyable night. Looking back, Jack realized it was the last time in a while he was really happy. It was the week before Mike came back, and the week Patrick Wesley reentered his life.


	6. Chapter 6

"How did you know him? Friend, family?"

"Neither. He was someone who lived in my neighbourhood."

"How old were you when you met him?"

"Thirteen."

"How well did you know him?"

"Better than I wanted to."

* * *

"You like this, baby? You want it? Scream for me."

"Fuck me hard, Jack," Gabrielle screamed. It was what he wanted to hear and she wanted desperately to get him out of this slump he had slid into the past week. If giving into his vulgarity did that – not that she really thought it would but it wasn't like it was hurting anyone. "Oh yeah, you know I love it when you fuck me hard."

Actually, it was hurting her self-esteem to have to do this. And while he'd dominated her before sexually, he'd never been rough like he had been lately. Biting down and sucking on her neck and breasts hard enough to hurt, squeezing her ass when he took her doggy-style, slamming her against walls and over the front counter… he still brought her to orgasm every single time but there was a roughness there now which she'd never seen in him…

Like right now when he was slamming into her hard enough to make it hurt. She was still physically in ecstasy and the irony was sex had been much more unpleasant at times with Steve, but sex with Jack had never hurt before. At all. Ever.

And it wasn't just that. She increasingly sensed that it wasn't about having sex with her, like he just wanted to conquer her. Which was ridiculous because she knew better than anyone that Jack wasn't like that, but why did it feel like it did? She had briefly wondered if something had set him off to make him revert back to his old mentality – maybe introducing her to his family and seeing his brother hit on her had taken him back to a place where sex was about the conquest, not love – then discarded the idea. Jack would have told her if it had upset him that much, and besides, something like that would have made him more resolute in his respect for her, not the opposite.

She didn't know, of course, that the man who had sexually abused him for two years had just reentered his life by freak chance. Of all the ORs in all the hospitals in Sydney, Patrick decided to have a boating accident under Jack's watch? The tattoo had brought the memories flooding back and for precious seconds he had been thirteen again and being raped by a man he'd thought of as a father figure, a man who was telling him how he'd been begging for it for months and now he was getting what he wanted, and the pain had been so intense that Jack hadn't been able to move. Mike had thrown him out of surgery.

Patrick Wesley. The first person Jack had ever had sex with. Mike pointed out that it wasn't having sex with someone when they were raping you, but there was still a part of Jack that wondered if there was any truth to Patrick's accusations of him wanting it.

Patrick Wesley. Father figure and pedophile. For two years he had sexually abused him, occasionally raping him but usually giving him the 'alternative' of a blow job. Jack could do it better than most of the women he'd been with. He'd had to learn because if he couldn't satisfy Patrick, the consequences would horrific. It was humiliating and disgusting and he always threw up afterwards but at least it didn't leave him feeling for weeks afterward like he'd been ripped apart.

Patrick Wesley, who had invaded Jack's life again and come into his OR and brought the memories crashing back. Emotionally, he collapsed. It was like everything he had made for himself in the last ten years had been destroyed and he was sixteen again needing to run from the tragic, horrifying memories – and needing to prove himself sexually, to prove that he was one hundred percent straight. And he did that by having sex with Gabrielle over and over and over. He was pushing them both to the point of exhaustion but he needed the buzz he got immediately after sex that was the only thing that made him feel like a man these days. He didn't want to be held, he wanted to get laid.

He knew she wanted him to be gentle with her but he wasn't in the frame of mind for gentle. He needed to dominate her, to control her, to conquer her. He reverted to his old mentality of sex being about control – his control. He needed to be able to feel her under him, pinned by the weight of his body, unable to do anything but take it while his fucked her as hard as his considerable strength allowed. It was vulgar but he was way beyond any ability to approach sex any other way.

And he always made sure she came. That was his ironclad rule, the thing that distinguished, in Jack's mind, his sexual control of Gabrielle with Patrick's sexual control of him.

He felt her shudder in orgasm, pumped her for a few minutes, came, and got off her. For a few minutes he felt like a man then he started to feel restless and anxious again.

"Jack, is something the matter?" Gabrielle asked. She could sense it every time, that moment when he started to get restless.

"Why would something be the matter?"

"I don't know. You've been different all week and the sex is… different."

He frowned. "Am I hurting you? You need to tell me if I'm hurting you."

"No, it's not that. It's… Jack, it feels like you don't respect me when you have sex with me."

"That's ridiculous. You know I love you. Are we starting up again on this insecurity bullshit?"

His tone shocked her. The last time Jack had sworn at her had been the fight they'd had over her jealousy at seeing him with Rebecca. "I know you love me, Jack. But I know you haven't been yourself for a week. All you want to do is have sex and when we do have sex I feel like you don't respect me, like you just want to fuck me." She was beginning to understand why Bianca hated him so much, if that's how he had made her feel after he was done with her.

Jack got out of bed. "I can't believe I'm hearing this," he muttered angrily. "It's just been a lousy week at work and you're accusing me of treating you like a hooker."

"Jack, that's not what I'm saying. I'm worried about you, that's all."

"I don't need you to worry about me. I'm fine." He rummaged through the pocket of his pants, looking for his keys.

"Jack, please don't go. I want you to stay." She didn't want him to leave like this. Maybe with enough affection and words of love she could ease him out of this slump.

"You'll stop bugging me?" he asked warily. She nodded. "Come here." She jumped into his arms and they started kissing. She went to wrap her arms around his neck but he pushed them behind her back. She didn't realize what he was doing until he was looping his belt around her wrists.

"Jack, please, no," she said in a small, weak voice.

"You trust me, don't you?"

"Of course I do, it's just that –"

"Then you've got nothing to worry about." He tightened the belt and pushed her back onto the bed.

* * *

"What's up with you?" Dan asked Jack a few days later. Jack was looked sullen and bouncing a rubber ball against the wall.

"I'm horny and Gabby's working," Jack complained.

Dan smirked. "I don't know how you do it, man. You've been over there four nights this week. Wish I had your stamina." He turned to grab a beer from the kitchen.

"Dan?" Jack asked. He turned back to his friend. Dan was aware Jack was deeply troubled about something but he knew better than to pry. If Jack wanted to open up, he would do so in his own time. "Were you ever bullied in school?"

"Um, look at me, man. Skinny little computer geek who wears glasses, I was a bully-magnet."

"How did you deal with it?"

"Scared them off with my kung-fu powers," Dan laughed. "Mostly I just made them laugh. Look, mate… do you want to talk? About anything? It's just that I've noticed you're really upset about something and I'm here if you want to talk… or not."

"There was this guy who lived near me growing up. He used to set me up with odd jobs, cleaning the pool and stuff. I loved him like he was my father, he was certainly a better father figure than the one I had… at least until I was thirteen and he… he molested me," Jack confessed, his voice breaking from the pain of the memory.

Dan, needless to say, was shocked. "I had no idea," was the first thing out of his mouth, which was stupid, because having been sexually abused wasn't something you went around advertising. "For how long?"

"Two years." Jack closed his eyes and Dan could see the tears start. His instinct was to hug his friend but he realized this was where Jack's homophobic streak came from and touching him now would probably just earn a backhand. "Sometimes with the right trigger it's like I'm thirteen again and the pain is so intense I have a hard time convincing myself it's not real. The first time he did it, I thought he was going to kill me, it felt like he was ripping me in half."

Dan flinched at that description. Jack couldn't blame him and was too upset to notice anyway. He'd witnessed the horrific damage anal rape could do, you couldn't work in an ED and not have, but it was one thing to witness it and another to a friend describe it. "Jack, I'm so sorry. Who else knows?"

Jack sniffled. "Mike."

"You never told your dad?"

"I tried, once, to tell Stella. The bastard had gotten in first and told her he caught me stealing from him. Two birds with one stone, not only did she not believe me but she kept forcing me back to make up for it. And she belted the crap out of me for it. I don't know if my dad could have handled it anyway, he was so macho about sex. It was perfectly acceptable for him to screw around on his wife but gay sex is so unacceptable to him that I don't know if he would have seen the distinction."

"And Gabrielle doesn't know?"

"How can I tell her, Dan? Oh, by the way, the longest sexual relationship I've ever been in was with a man. I don't want her to know that happened to me. I can't take the risk that maybe she'll think I did something to encourage it or she'll look at me like I'm damaged goods or she'll be like my dad and not able to make the distinction."

"Jack, this is Gabrielle you're talking about. She loves you and she sees this kind of thing all the time, she'll understand. She's not going to think any less of you because someone forced themselves onto you."

"It's one thing to see it professionally and another to deal with it personally," Jack countered. "I know what I'm doing, OK? She can't know."

"OK." Dan knew better than to argue with Jack when he dug in like this. But he knew Jack was doing Gabrielle a huge disservice. She wouldn't care what had happened to him – well, she would care, but she wouldn't judge him.

He left Jack to his deep loneliness and anguish.

* * *

"Jack, slow down. You know I don't want to get caught on hospital grounds again."

Jack responded by kissing her harder and groping her more shamelessly. He had paged her fifteen minutes beforehand to meet him in the NUMs office of the abandoned ward 17. She was a bit wary about this, one because she didn't want to get carried away with him on hospital grounds and secondly because this was Terri Sullivan's ward. But she met him anyway. "I'm so hot for you right now," he said gutturally. He took her hand and placed it against his crotch. He wasn't kidding.

She snatched it away, horrified. "Jack, no way! Not after last time."

"What, you think anyone cares that we have sex? Don't be so uptight. Get on your knees." Jesus Christ, he'd come to her after a confrontation with Patrick, who had told him all over again that anything he had done to Jack had been consensual, he needed to prove that wasn't true and she was being all prim-and-proper, like anyone gave a crap if they had sex on hospital grounds. It wasn't even real sex, it was only a blowjob. Patrick had told him that.

A chill went down her spine at just how direct he was being. It was the way he'd speak to a prostitute. "No," she said indignantly. "You can wait."

"I'm so horny if you don't, I don't know how I'm going to cope." The unspoken words hung in the air so much clearer than if Jack had said them. He knew how Gabrielle felt about infidelity and even the vaguest hint about satisfying himself elsewhere could make her crumble. That he had no intention of making good on his threat didn't matter, just making the threat was sufficient. She got on her knees. "Good girl," he said. He unzipped his pants, placed his hand on the back of her head and slammed it down her throat hard enough she nearly gagged. She immediately wanted to stop but Jack was holding her head down so firmly she couldn't pull away without biting down and as much as she hated being in this position, she didn't hate him, at least not enough to do that to him.

He watched her as he started pumping her mouth. God, it was such a power trip to make her do something she didn't want to. It was a pity she was being so stubborn about anal sex. But he'd wear her down.

He kept her head down after he came until the pleasure started to recede. "Thanks," he said as casually as if she'd passed him a pen. "I needed that. See you tonight, OK?" And she nodded and Jack kissed her chastely on the cheek as if he hadn't just forced her into a degrading sexual act and went back to work.

She started to cry. She had no idea what was going on in Jack's head, only that it was getting worse with each passing day, his requests more demeaning and more about him controlling her, dominating her, conquering her. He was rarely fussed on having sex in bed unless he could tie her up. Bent over the kitchen counter was a favorite. So was doing it watching porn. He was constantly on at her for anal sex, which she refused, because she didn't trust him to be gentle enough.

Jack was evolving into someone sick and perverted with little interest in how she felt beyond the fact she climaxed every time. Like that was the sole gauge for a person's sexual wellbeing.

A few days later Mike let himself into her office. "I'm sorry, Frank's out to lunch," she said, wondering if she would maneuver the conversation onto Jack. If anyone knew what was going through his head these days, it would be Mike.

"Actually, it was you I came to see," he said. He walked over and lifted her hands to inspect them. She looked away in shame. Two nights ago Jack had held her down with enough force to leave nasty bruises on her wrists. "I noticed those earlier today. If I didn't know better, I'd say Jack held you down while you were having sex."

"Mike, do you have any idea what's gotten into him? Everything was great until a few weeks ago and then it was like someone switched on this other side of his personality and ever since it's like sex is all about power to him. He doesn't care about me, he doesn't respect me, he gets off on controlling me. I don't know how much more of this I can take."

Mike dropped her hands. "I'll talk to him," he promised. It floored Mike that Jack could treat her like this. Well, actually he understood why but he'd credited Jack with more intelligence than do this to her. Gabrielle loved him and would be his rock if he let her but he wouldn't open up to her about what had happened to him because he thought she'd judge him. It had occurred to Mike more than once to tell Gabrielle himself but he knew how easily that could backfire. Jack might just withdraw even further and alienate himself from both Gabrielle and Mike. "If it's worth anything, he does love you, he's just going through some stuff right now."

"Some stuff," Gabrielle said bitterly.

Mike located Jack later that afternoon. "You are the world's biggest idiot," he hissed to his protégé.

"Excuse me?" Mike had really been irritating Jack lately with his attitude towards Gabrielle. He thought she should be informed of the situation. What was it with Mike and Dan? Didn't they understand how much he had to lose if she didn't love him the same way?

"You. The way you're treating Gabrielle. You know perfectly well that what happened to you makes you predispositioned to being a sexual predator but you're not even trying to keep yourself in check. In fact, I think you're indulging in it. Why don't you just get drunk and bash her, then you can emulate both father figures."

Jack barely restrained himself from hitting his mentor. "How dare you!" he yelled. "You have no idea what I'm going through!"

"Yeah, I do, Jack. The guy who sexually abused you is back in your life and you're too gutless to tell your friend about it. Do you not see how much she wants to be there for you? Or are you too busy forcing her to put up with your perversions?"

"Go to hell, Mike. I haven't made her do anything she doesn't want to do." They both knew that wasn't true.

"Don't expect me to care when she dumps you," Mike threatened.

"Oh, I never credited you with caring about anyone," Jack snapped back.

* * *

Two days later, he was waiting for Gabrielle to get back from her shift. Dan was out with Erica so it was a rare night that Gabrielle agreed to stay over. She wasn't comfortable with the fact her subordinate was in the next room. But she'd been held up with a bus accident that had given them a dozen patients to deal with just as she was walking out the door, so she felt duty-bound to stay and help.

Six turned into seven, seven into eight, eight into ten. By the time Gabrielle arrived, apologizing profusely for being four hours late, Jack had long since hit the vodka. He was furious that she dared stand him up. She was meant to be his girlfriend and she was putting work first just when he needed her. Just like Terri. God, when was he going to learn not to get involved with these women?

"I was lonely," he said accusingly.

She cringed under his drunk glare. She had never seen him in such a foul mood and she felt fear run down her spine. "I'm sorry," she said. "But we had a whole lot of patients at the last minute and I couldn't just leave them. I thought about calling you to come in, since I wasn't getting out til it was over, you may as well help."

He threw the empty glass at her head and it narrowly missed her, smashing against the wall behind her. "You bitch!" he screamed at her. "You. Cannot. Do that to me."

He was drunk and she tried not to take it personally. "I can do whatever I like, Jack, you don't own me. And whatever's eating you up inside, it's gone on long enough. You are sick and perverted and need help. I'm going home, I won't take this from you anymore."

Quick as a snake, he was by her side and he struck her with enough force to send her tumbling backwards. "You will take whatever I see fit to dish out!" he screamed and Gabrielle saw in his eyes that he had completely lost it. "You're my girlfriend, that's your job!"

"You don't treat me like a girlfriend, Jack, you treat me like a whore," she sobbed.

"No, if you were a whore, I'd be paying you, and believe me, honey, you are not worth paying." For a second she stared at him in absolute horror that he could say something so cruel.

She got up and started walking to the door. She made two steps. He lunged for her and held her against him, his arms around her like bands of steel. She struggled against him and only now realized just how strong he was. He grabbed her hair and she cried out when he yanked down, forcing her head to tilt up. He kissed her violently, and she bit down on his tongue.

"Bitch!" he screamed at her, letting her go long enough to hit her again. "Whore! God, I don't know why I've put up with you this long." He picked her up and started carrying her towards his room and she realized what he was planning to do.

She struggled against him, for all the good it did her. "Stop it! Please Jack, stop it. This is rape." She was sobbing now and scarcely able to comprehend Jack's intentions. This was a man she loved, had held, had thought she'd known – but he'd completely lost it, he'd gone crazy.

He hit her a third time. "Don't ever say that!" he screamed, and it sunk in that Jack was determined to have sex with her even if it meant having to beat her into submission.

Hating herself, she submitted, frightened enough on this madman on top of her, frightened of what he might do to her if she fought him. She went limp and let him take her clothes off. He was oblivious to her tears. She cried out when he penetrated her. She was bone dry and some faraway place in her mind was surprised he managed to get it in. She'd overseen rape cases of course and knew how physically painful it could be but she hadn't expected this.

It was over quickly and when he was done, Jack got off her he went straight to sleep. She lay there for a few minutes in numb shock, trying to comprehend firstly what Jack had done and secondly why he had done it. He'd hit her, raped her and then fallen asleep like it was a normal everyday activity.

Still sobbing, she got dressed and left as quickly as she could.

* * *

"Good God, what's He done to you?" Mike didn't need to know Jack had been the one to strike her. She wouldn't be coming to him if it was anyone else.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. She hadn't been able to stop crying since she'd left Jack's house two hours ago. She had sat under the show for one of those hours, trying to comprehend why Jack had done it, before deciding that whatever Mike knew, she was going to make him give it up. "I know it's late but I didn't know where else to go."

"It's fine, come in." He led her into the house. He motioned to the couch. "Sit. What's your poison of choice?" he asked.

"I don't care so long as it's not vodka." She could still taste it from his breath.

He made her a scotch and coke and she drank it gratefully. He knew he should make her slow down but the poor girl looked like she was about to lose it completely. "Do you mind?" he asked, and he framed her face with his hands in a motion that he wanted to inspect her. She shook her head. "OK let me know if this feels like anything more than a bruise." He began pressing into the skin, making her wince to have her tender skin assaulted a second time but it didn't feel like it was more than bruised. "What happened?" he asked.

"I was home really late – you know that bus accident. I was meant to leave at five but didn't get there until ten. I don't know how long he'd been drinking but he was so angry, he started calling me names and when I tried to leave he wouldn't let me and the look in his eyes…" she took a ragged breath. "He was determined to have sex with me even if he had to beat me senseless first."

Mike didn't want to believe Jack was capable of such violence. But he knew in the hearts off all humans lurks a capacity for enormous cruelty when the mind and heart are sick. And Jack was sick. "I'm sorry," he said, feeling deeply for this poor young woman who Jack was using her as his punching bag.

"Mike, I still love him. I don't want to but I can't help it. I know he's sick and I want to help him but I can't if I don't know what's going on. Please, if you know anything –"

"He was sexually abused as a kid. The guy who did it just came back into his life, he was a patient of ours a few weeks ago." Mike gave up this information without reservation, blaming himself for not telling her before.

"I'm sorry, what?" she asked. "I knew there was his step-mother, but –"

"I'd take a stab and say it was her abuse that made him vulnerable to Patrick in the first place. Jack rarely talks about his life, but has he mentioned anything traumatic happened around twelve or thirteen? Something that would have created a void for Patrick to fill?"

"His grandmother died. He said she was the only one who cared about him other than his sister."

"Ah. That explains a lot."

"Mike, I don't understand. I mean, what happened exactly? He never talks about his childhood, I had no idea…" but even as she said those words, her mind was flashing back through things he had told her, his issues with intimacy. It wasn't just physical and emotional, the abuse had been sexual as well. Oh, God. Her heart cried for him and she immediately forgave him for what he'd just done to her. It had been heinous but it paled in comparison to his own abuse.

Mike saw understanding in her eyes, knew she would be able to forgive him. Good. Jack was still an asshole for having done it but he needed her and thank God she was able to understand. It had been what Dan and Mike had been trying to her through to him. "I don't know the details but I know he was raped and he made this comment about being able to give a better blow job than most of the women he'd been with. Oh, and he hates it when you put too much pressure on the back of his head."

"The first night we met I went down on him and afterwards he refused to kiss me. Was so apologetic about it but said it made him throw up. I tried not to take it personally but…I resented him for it. Oh, God, I resented him for it when that bastard must have humiliated him for a sport."

"I think he understands. And this is really important for you to understand. He thinks you won't love him the same way if you know. He thinks you'll see it as diminishing his masculinity, or that he's used goods, or that maybe he did something to encourage him – you know some of the rubbish rape victims come up with."

Gabrielle nodded dumbly. Last year they'd had a teenage girl in who'd refused to let them call her father because she was afraid he would consider her a slut. "You need to go home and think about this. He needs time to sober up – and you need to remember that what he did to you may have been awful but he is much more the victim here." Gabrielle nodded again. Mike hugged her. Because he was fond of Jack, he saw her as a quasi daughter-in-law. He couldn't help but smile over that one. He, Mike Vlasek, caring about someone like a daughter.

* * *

"Jack, I know. Mike told me everything. It doesn't change anything between us. I love you and I forgive you for last night."

That was all it took to break through the defenses Jack had built around himself. His knees buckled and he groped for the doorframe before he collapsed. "It's OK," she said, and she leaned in to hug him. She helped him get to the couch and then he completely broke down. His breakdown over Charlotte's pregnancy was like a passing bad mood compared to this. He cried and screamed for hours and Gabrielle wondered just how he had stood it. The shame, the loneliness – over and over she repeated it didn't make a difference to her until she thought maybe it was sinking in.

She went through the events with him and by the end of it, would gladly have watched the damn video all day than have heard what Jack went through. Patrick had first raped him a few days after his thirteenth birthday, which also happened to be two weeks to the date on his grandmother's funeral. Stella had been particularly vicious in those two weeks, knowing that whatever allies Jack had in the world were gone and hating him for, on top of everything else, earning Ana's love when Ana hadn't thought much of either Stella or Ned.

Patrick had called Stella to complain he'd caught Jack stealing, so when Jack got home and tried to tell her about the rape, she'd struck him for being a liar, then calmly told him she and Patrick had agreed he would work off his dead until Patrick thought he had made amends.

It took One year, eleven months and three days, eighteen rapes and one hundred and thirty four blow jobs for Patrick to grow bored of him. It chilled Gabrielle that Jack knew the numbers so completely but then, if it happened to her… "And it's little things that make me hate him all the time, like how many women I've pissed off about the blowjob thing. He held my head down until he was done and I threw up every single time. It's not fair that I hate it when even you put too much pressure here –" he took her hand and placed it where his skull curved at the back " – because of that."

"Jack, you know I don't care about that."

"I know you don't. But I hate it all the same." He started to cry again. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry for last night. I was so angry and drunk and I was pissed off that you weren't there… Oh, God…"

"I forgive you. I understand why you did it and… I can't hate you, not when I know why you did it. Even when you were doing it, I knew it wasn't you. Oh, Jack, I've wanted to be here for you and you shut me out. You need to open up to me. You need to tell me what's going on in your head. I can listen to you describe being raped if that's what makes you feel better."

"You shouldn't have to do that."

"You shouldn't have to keep paying being a monster decided you would make a good outlet for his perversions."

He remained in her arms all night. She didn't want to go to his room because she never wanted to see that bed again (she could forgive him for it, but he was still footing the bill for a new bed) so she let him curl up with his head on her lap. When Dan came in, he received a look of such protectiveness – Gabrielle Jaeger's patented Rottweiler look – that he decided the best thing was to say nothing and go straight to bed.

Still, it was good that she finally knew. And her heart was strong enough to support him, Dan could see. If he'd known what had happened the night before, he would have been even more impressed by the strength of her heart.

If he'd been allowed to tell Jillian Henderson about Jack's abusive history, he would have explained this was why he had chosen Gabrielle.


	7. Chapter 7

Charlotte looked at Travis Knight with irritation. The guy creeped her out. It wasn't just that he was so obviously sick or his anxiousness that was making Charlotte herself feel anxious. It was his unhealthy keenness to speak to Jack even though she got the impression the two men had never met before. And Jack had a strong homophobic streak that he thought no-one knew about, she knew he wouldn't take to this guy. She was seriously tempted to tell him Jack had gone home for the day but lost the opportunity when Zoe called out, "Charlotte, tell Jack's friend he's on his way." And Travis had immediately perked up.

"… He didn't say what it was about?" Jack asked.

"Nope, and he looks really creepy. And sick. See if you can't get him to be admitted."

Jack approached the younger man cautiously. He wasn't in the best frame of mind to begin with, having started on the road to recovery by acknowledging what had happened to him and having to live with the fact he'd beaten and raped the woman he loved more than anyone else. (Gabrielle had gotten an exquisite pearl bracelet to go with her pendant. Not that you could buy someone's forgiveness for something like that. But it made him feel better to spend more money on her than he had every other girlfriend he'd had combined on her.) "Can I help you?" he asked. Travis asked to go somewhere private, and Jack wondered what the hell this guy's deal was. No way was he leaving the ED and Charlotte's watchful gaze (if Gabrielle was Rottweiler #1, the girlfriend, then Charlotte was keeping her company as Rottweiler #2, the sister-figure) with this creepy stranger who cared more about meeting a guy he'd never met before than he did getting treated for something that was obviously wrong with him.

"It's about Patrick Wesley," Travis said, and Jack knew he didn't want this conversation happening anywhere near his colleagues. He instructed Charlotte to let Gabrielle know he had left with someone regarding Patrick Wesley, a friend of theirs, and he would be back within an hour. He knew Travis wasn't going to cause him any harm but he liked knowing Gabrielle would know to raise the alarms if that hour came and went.

"Who's Gabby?" Travis asked.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets. "Girlfriend," he said.

"How long?"

"It will be our six-month anniversary next Friday."

"Must be nice," Travis said, and he didn't fail to notice the way Jack's eyes glazed over in a whimsical fashion. You couldn't really not notice.

"She gets me. She's my best friend and we've been through a lot to get to this point, it feels like longer than six months and… look, what do you want?"

"I want to make sure you're not piking out on me. The cop I spoke to says you haven't been returning my calls." Travis looked at Jack. "You are piking on me, you chickenshit. I don't believe this."

"You know what? It was a bad idea for me to get involved at all. I was feeling awful because I was taking my feelings out on Gabby but we've worked through it now and I don't want to bring it all up again."

"Must be nice, having someone who knows about it and loves you anyway," Travis said bitterly. "Me, I can't stand being touched. I'm twenty-three and a virgin. Well, you know what I mean by that."

Jack blanched. He knew perfectly well that neither of them had been virgin since they first hit their teens… and that both of them would have happily traded that for the awkwardness of being virgins at twenty-three. And he knew what Travis meant about being with someone who knew you and loved you anyway, because he had been terrified that Gabrielle wouldn't love him the same way if she knew. And he knew what Travis meant about not standing to be touched – if it hadn't been for Caitlin, and the speed, he would never have gotten over that hangup. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm just coming to a place where my reputation is in decent shape. How the hell am I going to look when it gets out my longest sexual relationship was with a pedophile?"

"Oh, my heart bleeds for you," Travis said. "I need you, Jack. You know what? Patrick left me a lovely little gift. I'm HIV-positive. Which means you could be too. And I don't have time to waste because you don't want people to know you were ever anything but one hundred percent straight. You have cred, people will take you seriously. You – why are you laughing at me?"

"I'm laughing because I'm a surgical registrar and you mustn't think of the Australian medical industry if you don't think I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get there. I cut people open for a living. I had to be tested for every known disease they could think of – I think my boss had particular fun with me because it's a matter of public record I caught STDs like other people caught colds when I was at uni. And Patrick gave me latent syphilis. That's when –"

"I know what it is," Travis said. He didn't know what it meant but he was bridling from the fact Jack thought it funny he didn't realize you had to jump so many hoops to be admitted as a surgeon.

"I was careless at uni but I've been so careful since then. I get tested every three months even though the law says a year for surgeons. Gabby's the first person I've been with long enough to not use a condom. If I had HIV, I would have known by now and been struck off."

"Well, good for you," Travis said bitterly. Nice to know he had a steady girlfriend and was disease free. "Does she know about Patrick?"

"If you were planning on blackmailing me, she does," he said.

"Does everyone else know? Your friends, the people you work with?"

Which actually gave Jack a thought – while he was on this path to redemption, Rebecca needed to be in the loop. He wondered if he could get Gabrielle to do the dirty work for him. Or Mike. Or Dan. He really didn't care who but he didn't want to see that first comprehension in his eyes, what he'd seen in Mike and Dan's and what he knew had been in Gabrielle's when Mike had told her. Mike had done him a favour, not only in telling her but in making it so he didn't have to witness that first comprehension. It was always there, that element of pity, even if they quickly moved onto understanding. So Rebecca needed to be told and preferably by someone else.

The idea of Travis going after Jack's family and colleagues made him nervous. "You go near anyone I care about and I'll hunt you down."

Travis laughed. "I'm already dying, I don't care. Jack, please, I need you. There's no-one else."

"I'm sorry, I can't. Maybe I'm being a coward but I've worked damn hard to get to this place and I won't jeopardize that because you need closure. " And with that he walked off.

* * *

"I think you're being too harsh on him. You had your intelligence and you had a girlfriend who really cared about you. I'm betting that's more than he had. C'mon, Jack, you know that there but for random chance you go."

Jack tensed in Gabrielle's arms. They still hadn't made love yet, he was scared to and have it turn into the soulless fucking he'd reverted to in the weeks he had been so out of it. So instead he just fell asleep in her arms – the funny thing was now they weren't sleeping together, she stayed over at his place. It was what he had been wanting for six months but not under these circumstances.

"I don't want to," he said. "I'm scared."

"And you think he isn't? Jack, imagine if you were in the same situation but without your intelligence to get you into uni and without – what was her name?"

"Caitlin," Jack supplied. He didn't like where this was going.

"Without Caitlin. For a sexual abuse survivor, you've had some lucky breaks. Not to mention that Dean who decided to make you think you were going to lose your scholarship – babe, you could have become a sexual predator like him before that clause got invoked, and by that time it would have been too late."

Jack shivered. "I know all this, OK? Do you know how guilty I feel? You should have heard how envious he was about you, over the fact I had a girlfriend who I was capable of sleeping with rather than tensing up every time she touched me. You shouldn't have to be envious of things like that."

She kissed him. "I know. But the fact is, Jack, you got a good deal as far as survivors go and you know it. You need to be there for this guy."

"I don't know how, Gabby. I can barely be there for myself."

She hugged him. She had the insight to realize she needed to be there for them both, she needed to be the strength that Jack could afford to pass onto Travis. She saw this reality and accepted it. She loved Jack enough that she never consciously realized it was worth it.

The impasse was broken the next day when Travis was admitted for what Jack assumed was complications from his HIV status. He took badly to Dan and Sean and spat hostility in Jack's direction. When Jack and Dan were alone, he confronted Jack on the fact it was rude not to tell strangers what they were talking about. Jack was so grateful of all the people he'd chosen to get confrontational around, it was Dan. "You remember me telling you about Patrick Wesley?" he asked. Dan nodded, not wanting anything to do with this conversation. "Travis was another of his victims."

"He already knew?" Travis asked. Jack nodded. "You could tell him but not a jury?"

"That's right. And if you put me in that position again, I will kill you myself."

An hour later, Gabrielle showed up for work. "You OK?" she asked. "You haven't kissed me yet." He kissed her distractedly on the cheek and then Gabrielle knew something was up. Jack was always quick to trade kisses in the morning. "That was a crap kiss," she said. "You either do better of I'll have to work out what's wrong,"

So he pulled her into his arms and kissed her passionately. They got applause from the rest of the staff, enough to attract Travis's attention. So that was Gabrielle. She was pretty. He felt jealous. He also knew what the next stunt pulled would be.

Gabrielle, of course, knew who Travis was. She saw it on his patient file. But Jack was in surgery so she couldn't call him on it. Instead, she just had to tend to him. He responded better to her than he had Dan or Sean; she wasn't sure how much of that was that he knew who she was and how much of it was he had the same homophobic streak Jack did and responded better to women.

"Did Jack tell you about me?" he asked with as much cheerfulness as he could muster.

"Yes, he did. And you know what? He raped me last week and now he's trying to come to terms with the fact he flirted with becoming the sexual predator he hates. I know how much pain he is in. So if you pull a stunt like this again – seriously, you don't want to know how many ways a farm girl like me has to kill a guy with." The Rottweiler had come out to play.

She had a knack of saying that which would have made Steve Irwin jealous of the distinctly Queensland accent. Travis squirmed in his bed. "I need Jack."

"I know. And I am doing my best. Sometimes I am so frustrated by him that I want to scream but I still know why he does what he does – "

She was shocked to find Travis's hand on hers. "I would have killed for a girlfriend like you," he said. "I hope Jack's sorry for what he did."

"More than he will ever comprehend, I think," she said, thinking about how many times he had cried in her arms for a guilt he would never be absolved of. And ironically, she loved him because he could never forgive himself for raping her. It as the integrity of the Jack she had known and loved coming through. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her… and she loved him because he knew it wasn't OK to do that to someone, even when she understood his reasons for doing it.

By the end of the day, they had worked out that Travis was suffering from Wilson's disease, not HIV. But His Wilson's was so far gone that it as may as well have been HIV. It wasn't fair. The guy was relieved from HIV to be given a much shorter death sentence.

Gabrielle's words affected him and seeing Travis dying slowly… he didn't care about reputation anymore, he cared about integrity. And he knew he could never meet Gabrielle's eyes if he couldn't do this. She had loved him after he had raped her, how could he deny her anything now? The pearl bracelet paled in comparison to what she needed from him now.

"I was wrong," he admitted to Travis. "I don't want to relive it and I don't want to go over it again. But I get that we have to do something now… or I have to live with the fact I didn't do anything to stop him doing it to another kid."

Travis smiled weakly at that. "You promise?"

"I promise."

Travis knew this pretty, Rottweiler of an angel was responsible. "I want to meet her," he said. "Properly."

"You will," Jack promised. "I don't think she's about to become unglued from my side."

He spent the evening with her having a panic attack over what was to come. What fun, the next few months of his sexuality being torn apart by a pedophile's lawyers, when deep down they would have known his promiscuity was caused by Patrick bloody Wesley. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair he be sexually abused for two years and it was his character on trial. It wasn't fair Patrick be allowed to run amok while charges of raping minors were going about. It wasn't fair. It wasn't –

"Jack, it's OK. Look at me. It's Gabby and I love you. And I love you so much more that you've agreed to do this."

"You shouldn't've had to agree to it in the first place. And I hate myself for putting you through this. "

"You may hate yourself but I still love you. And I will stand by you. Take me into your darkest hour, remember? I will support you in hell before I leave you – maybe not even as a lover but I will always be here for you as a friend. I will always be your Gabby."

It was then he realized he wanted to marry her.

* * *

"I'm sorry, you did _what_?"

Jack looked guilty and ashamed. Sarah Thomson couldn't blame him. She wasn't even that surprised that he'd done it; she was more surprised Gabrielle had stayed with him. But he needed to be upfront about his character Patrick Wesley's lawyers were no doubt right now digging up every piece of dirt they could find on Jack and Travis and Jack's history of promiscuity wasn't going to look good. The jury wouldn't care that it stemmed from the torment of having been sexually abused, they'd just see someone who was reckless about his personal life and was looking for someone to blame. "I wasn't thinking," he said hoarsely. "I was angry and she was there and…"

"It's OK, Jack. I just needed to know. Who else knows? Apart from us, I mean."

"My boss. But he's my physician so they can't subpoena him."

Sarah checked her notes. Having Mike Vlasek as a GP was like using dynamite to go after a fly. The guy was so high up on the food chain he didn't even have the title of 'Doctor' anymore. Clever boy, thinking of that. She wasn't to know that Wesley's lawyers were being tied up trying to argue Jack was hiding something to have one of the country's top surgeon's engaged as his GP and that Mike was loving every second of teaching them Czech profanities. "I would never recommend making a mockery of marriage, but if they get even a hint that you did something like that…"

"I'd never betray Jack like that," Gabrielle said.

Sarah wasn't surprised by the strength and dignity in her voice. She specialized in sexual assault crimes and had known the second she met the woman Gabrielle would be a big asset. But Wesley's lawyers were playing dirty, the fact they'd already tried to subpoena his boss was testimony to that. She was surprised they hadn't tried to get something out of Gabrielle yet, but that would change eventually. "I know you wouldn't do anything intentionally but these lawyers are dirty. I've dealt with them before. If they ever get the idea you raped your girlfriend – well, she can't testify against you if she's your wife."

"What do you think?" Jack asked her later that day. He was deeply shaken by the idea she could be forced to testify against him – not so much that something like that could get out but that she could be forced to go through something like that. It was one thing to destroy his credibility – and Jack knew they were digging up every bit of dirt about his sexual history they could find – but it was another thing entirely to go after Gabrielle. He unconsciously squeezed her hand tightly. He'd kill Patrick himself before he let the bastard put her through anything.

"About what?"

"About marrying me." There. He'd said it. It wasn't the way he had planned to say it but now it was in the open.

Gabrielle laughed. Laughed. It was grim, ironic laughter but she laughed nonetheless at his marriage proposal. "Jack, I am not marrying you because you're scared I'll testify against you. I won't do that. I'll lie under oath and say you have never been anything but the most considerate lover if I have to."

"What, as opposed to no lover at all?" he asked bitterly. He wondered if that's why she didn't want to marry him, because he couldn't satisfy her in bed. He had tried but every time he touched her sexually he thought about beating her into submission and having sex with her while she cried.

"Jack, don't be like that. You just need time."

He didn't say anything and a cloud settled over their afternoon.

* * *

"I have to get back. I have an ED to run."

"There is no-one in the ED, remember?" Frank had shuffled around patients so they went to different hospitals or different wards. There wasn't much point in trying to keep the ward running after they had just lost one of their own doctors. Charlotte was inconsolable with grief and guilt, her last words with Sean having been a fight over what she perceived as his blabbing to Zoe everything she'd ever said. (Jack remembered telling them both Charlotte needed to know, you told your best friends those kinds of things or they had a way of backfiring.) Dan had been sent home. Bart had chosen the most inopportune moment to blurt out his crush on Erica, and Dan wanted his help consoling Bart later on. Jack didn't think he was ready to leave Gabrielle's side. And Zoe was a mess.

Watching Zoe crumble had unsettled him. He'd known Sean and Zoe professionally and personally, the four of them socializing a lot together in the last few months. They were older than Jack and Gabrielle but the two couples had clicked so they'd had more opportunity than anyone else to know them personally and as a couple.

Jack had related to Sean's frustration that Zoe insist they keep a lid on things. Which just proved that you were never to old to screw up. He bet Zoe was regretting every cross word she and Sean had exchanged over the matter.

He could relate to Sean getting jealous about the attention Mike had been paying her – he himself had had that issue with Sean paying attention to Gabrielle. And for them to not have fully reconcile before he died – he never he couldn't live with it if the same thing had happened between him and Gabrielle.

The ED had ground to a halt. There were still a few of them on, but with no patients, they were just wandering around, inconsolable. Frank was with Zoe, Charlotte was with Vincent. Mike had let Jack use his office so he'd bundled Gabrielle up and taken her upstairs. She was now crying in his lap, insisting she had to get back to work.

He held her. "We both have our beepers, Frank will call us if he needs us. Gabby, you can barely stand this. You don't have to be strong, it's only me."

"Oh, God, Jack, it's not fair. And I keep seeing Zoe in my head and how I'd be if I lost you."

"I know." He didn't think he wanted her out of his sight for the next few days.

"No, Jack, you don't. I keep thinking about how I kept telling you no and how Zoe did and she must regret it now and how I'd feel if I lost you. I love you so much and I'm scared of losing you."

"You're not going to lose me. Look at everything we've been through. You couldn't get rid of me if you tried. I love you too much to ever let you go. Look, I have something for you."

She sniffled. "What?" she asked half-heartedly. Jack's words were a comfort to her but she didn't have the emotional energy to care much about anything. She had cried everything out onto Jack's shirt.

"Here. I had it made up. I know how much you like pearls."

It was a beautiful white gold ring with a grey pearl in the centre surrounded by diamonds. She gasped when she saw it, its beauty and the trouble Jack had gone to for it momentarily distracting her from the tragedy at hand. "Jack, I can't take this. I know what you make. You can't afford it."

"I finally got around to selling Terri's engagement ring," he said. "It was just sitting there and I decided it was bad luck to hold onto it."

She was pleased and touched he had finally gotten around to it. She'd found it unnerving he was holding onto the engagement ring he'd bought for someone he'd loved enough to want to marry, even if it was in a security box at the bank. If it was so sentimental to him that he couldn't let go of it over two years later… She was so pleased she entirely missed the meaning behind Jack's reference to the old engagement ring. "It's beautiful," she said, and proceeded to put it on the middle finger of her right hand.

His heart skipped a beat. Oh, no. She had completely misconstrued his intentions. Well, he'd gone this far. "That's not what I meant," he said. "Here." And he pulled the ring off her finger and onto the ring finger on her right hand.

"Jack, I already told you…"

"Look, I made a real hash of things when I asked you before. I don't want to marry you so they can't subpoena you. We can wait until after if you want. I wanted to marry you because you're the best thing that's ever happened to me and I'd be an idiot if I didn't do everything in my power to keep you in my life."

She gasped. "Jack, are you serious?"

"I don't exactly get engagement rings made up everyday, you know," he said. "Look, if you don't want to that's fine but tell me straight out. I can't stand the suspense."

"Oh, God, Jack, yes," she said.

He kissed her. "I thought you were going to turn me down," he said huskily. They began making out on the couch (Mike would not be impressed if he found out) and it was the most he had managed to do since the rape. Their legs were tangled together and it wasn't long before she could feel his erection against her thigh.

"Jack, is the door locked?" she asked.

"Yeah, why?"

She grinned at him. "You know why. No pressure," she added. The last thing she needed was Jack getting performance anxiety. But if things went smoothly on the couch, well, it wouldn't be the first time one thing had led to another…

He maneuvered awkwardly so she was on top of him. It would be a while since he would be comfortable having her beneath him. He ran his hands along her body as he kissed her hungrily, and she returned the compliment. He whimpered as she unbuttoned his shirt and started kissing him down his chest. "I love you," he whispered. "I love you, I love you, I love – oh Jesus, do that again." She complied. She smiled. She'd forgotten how much of a kick it could be, turning Jack on. She unzipped her pants and pushed his hand provocatively down.

"Touch me," she said, and he complied. He liked this new version of Gabrielle who was far more assertive sexually than the old Gabrielle. He needed to hear her tell him what she wanted. He drew a ragged breath when he realized just how wet she was. She helped him out of his pants and he returned the favour. She climbed on top of him and he just about came there and then to be back inside her. He bit down hard when she started riding him, sending his body into overload. _Please God, I know I'm not going to last long but please don't let me make an ass of myself before three minutes._

He lasted five. "I've never come that quickly," he said, grinning like an idiot, barely caring that she hadn't climaxed. He'd done it! God, it felt so good to know he still could.

"I'm flattered I could make you lose control like that," she said. They dressed and cuddled on the couch for a few minutes before she started to feel restless in this office, in this hospital. She needed more from Jack than a few minutes on his boss's couch. "Why don't you take me home and make love to me properly," she suggested.

"Sounds good to me. And by the way, I'm really liking this new Gabby. You should tell me what you want me to do to you more often."

"You can start by going down on me when we get home. You owe me an orgasm," she retorted.

"What, you didn't think I was letting you get away with giving me all the pleasure?"

* * *

"How do you feel?"

"Safe. Loved. Respected." Gabrielle stretched out like a cat. She just about purred. Then she realized that wasn't what Jack was talking about. "A little sore."

"I went as easy on you as I could."

She stared at him. He wasn't beating himself up over it, was he? Apparently so. "I knew it wasn't going to be the most comfortable thing the first time and I know you couldn't have gone any easier. My first time with Steve was worse 'cos he wasn't a big believer in caring about lubrication." She stroked his face. "I asked you to do it, remember? When you kept harassing me before, I didn't want to do it 'cos I didn't trust you not to be gentle. But I trust you now. I want to do it again."

"It won't be so awkward next time," Jack said.

"What, you know this from experience?" she quipped.

He found himself laughing over that. It was in appalling taste but he'd never been able to laugh about it and never thought he would be able to. "Um… no. At least not in the way you're saying." He made a face. "God, that's the most tasteless thing I've ever heard you say."

She was relieved he could laugh over it. She didn't know why she'd said it except maybe she was hoping he could laugh over it. She lay in his arms for a few minutes, passively accepting his touch as he ran his fingers up and down her back. "Jack, I've been thinking."

"About what?"

"About that… well, if it's alright with you… that maybe I would… go off the pill."

He stopped stroking her and went dead silent. She was worried she'd completely misread the situation. Then he said, "Sweetheart, don't make a decision like that based on what I want."

"You really think I'd commit to something like that when I didn't want it?"

"Well, you know it's something I really want and you knew how upset I was over Charlotte's pregnancy… are you seriously saying you want a baby?"

"Yes, Jack, I am seriously saying I want a baby. Your baby. I've been thinking about it for a while but I didn't know how committed you were to being with me."

In an instant, Jack had flipped her onto her back and was kissing her exuberantly despite having been exhausted a few minutes before. "God, if I'd known that's what you wanted, I'd have asked you to marry me months ago. Oh, God, Gabby, you know this is something I really want." He started running his hands over her body, down her torso, between her legs…

"Jack! What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing? Getting started."

"Jack, you can't –" and then she gave up. Telling Jack the effect of the pill wasn't going to wear off for at least a few weeks wouldn't do anything; now he had the idea in his head he was ready to go this very second. Instead, she accepted his enthusiasm and determination with the knowledge that, hopefully, in a few months she'd be married and pregnant.

* * *

Patrick was dead, and Travis was dying. Jack had wanted the bastard to pay for what he'd done to them and countless others, but not like this. Death had seemed like the easy way out. Prison would have been a much more horrific experience for him, everyone knew pedophiles were at the bottom of the food chain in prison. Maybe he would have gotten a taste of his own medicine.

Instead, he had died on the operating table despite his and Mike's best efforts. And then there had been the embarrassment of Gabrielle threatening to tell Zoe exactly why he couldn't treat Patrick if Jack didn't step away voluntarily. And now Frank knew because it was the only way he'd been willing to agree to have Travis committed and everything was crap.

He gripped the railing of the hospital balcony and was dimly aware he was twenty stories up. "I hope you're not planning on doing anything," Gabrielle said, coming up behind him. He was going to have a fight on his hands if he thought he could jump.

"Leave me alone."

"I'm your fiancée, Jack. What did you think I would do? Let you treat him? What would have happened if he'd died under your watch? You don't think I love you enough to stop you from doing something so stupid?"

"I had to treat him. I wanted him to be alive so he could go to trial."

"What, and you think Mike didn't want him to face justice? He's pissed off. We all are." She hugged him from behind. He was stiff, but at least he didn't try to throw her off. "Jack, it's over. Don't shut me out."

"I've lived with him in my head for the past fifteen years," he said. "More than half my life. I don't know how I can make it be over. What you're doing right now, being at my back, I have to tell myself it's only you."

She let Jack go and stood next to him. "Then face me. Tell me what to do." She stroked his face and she saw he was weakening. "Why don't you take me home and see what you can do about giving me a baby?"


	8. Chapter 8

"He takes things pretty hard, doesn't he?"

"That's the second patient he's lost today."

Rachel Simms felt incredibly sorry for Jack. He was intelligent and a good doctor and she couldn't help but be a little taken with him – he wasn't exactly bad looking. She hated seeing the way he was after losing his patient – his second patient for the day. "Poor guy," she said.

Dan looked at her with interest. "Are you keen on him?" he asked.

Rachel squirmed. It wasn't a good idea to go advertising your feelings without getting a feel for the place and the people. "Maybe," she said. "Is he – is he seeing someone?"

Dan couldn't resist. "Nope," he said. It always amused him to watch women hitting on Jack. Maybe if he had a better understanding of why Gabrielle was as insecure as she was – but it amused Dan to watch Gabrielle squirm and watch Jack be completely clueless when a woman was hitting on him. It helped that being in and out of surgery all day made it inconvenient for Jack to wear his engagement ring on his finger where it was supposed to go, so he wore it on a chain around his neck.

Of course, no-one had been happier for them than Dan, but he still considered Jack fair game if he could have a laugh at his expense. It had been three weeks since they had announced their engagement (keeping it quiet for a month before that on account it had been Sean's death that had prompted Jack into proposing and it had seemed kind of tacky to throw that in Zoe's face) and spirits were running high for both of them. Which Rachel was completely oblivious to her.

"That was mean," Erica told him later after they had reconciled and ended up in bed. "She seems really sweet and she's going to be running after a guy who's too in love to notice when someone else is interested in him. I'm going to tell her the next time I see her."

It turned out Erica didn't get the opportunity before fate intervened. The next day they got handed a nasty patient, a man who kept insisting on being treated by a male doctor. Given they only had Frank and Bart, that proved to be difficult. It turned out the guy had been bashed by the brothers of a woman he'd raped and beaten to death. He took it at his due but didn't want to be around women and have temptation in his face. Things came to a head when he snapped, calling Charlotte, Gabrielle and Rachel whores and sluts in such a tone of voice that he manage to unnerve the usually unflappable Gabrielle and Charlotte. The two friends were down in the cafeteria having coffee and a distressed Rachel wasn't looking where she was going when she walked straight into Jack.

"Easy," he said. He'd heard the commotion and checked on Gabrielle before she went out with Charlotte. Based on what Mike had said, it thoroughly creeped him out that the guy had been around Gabrielle. He wanted to join her on that coffee but he understood she wanted to be with someone who'd been there.

Rachel felt Jack's arms go around her to steady her. He didn't realize he was being quite awkward about it because he didn't like being in close proximity with women other than Gabrielle, let alone someone he kind of found attractive. "You OK?" he asked. She nodded dumbly, thrilled to be in his arms. She looked shaken. He couldn't blame her. He hadn't taken well to be called a slut and physically threatened, either. "Look, why don't we get a coffee in the tea room? I'm on call for another two and a half hours so I don't have anything better to do."

"Sure," she agreed happily, much to Dan's amusement.

"You look pretty shaken," Jack noted. "More than I would expect – I mean, I know it would be pretty distressing, but sweetheart, you're still shaking."

She sipped the coffee he'd made for her gratefully. "I'm fine," she said, thrilled he cared and not realizing that was just what Jack did, he cared a lot, especially when it came to sexual predators. And she didn't realize the sweetheart was something he tacked on out of habit, although he was trying to drop it.

"Oh, so you're going to make me guess? You don't seem the type to date abusive men so I'm guessing a family member."

"Step-father," Rachel admitted.

"Did he ever…?"

"Come onto me? No. He was just… very creepy, very quick to get angry, made comments about appearance which were highly inappropriate. Can't stand being around people like that."

"I had a step-mother who was kind of like that."

"I'm sorry."

Jack shrugged. "It was… character building. I routinely send my tax returns home, I make more than my dad, stepmother and half-brothers combined."

Rachel laughed. She didn't know Jack was going out of her way to make her relax because he had a soft spot for people who got shaken up over stuff like this. She only knew he was really easy to talk to. They spoke for half an hour, Rachel lingering over her coffee. She loved the sound of his voice, loved the way he smiled. "Listen, do you ah… maybe want to go for a drink… when you're free?"

Jack looked embarrassed. "Look, uh –"

"If you're not attracted to me, that's fine," Rachel said. "I bet you have gorgeous women lining up around the block to date you."

"No, that's not it. I –"

At that point, Gabrielle walked in. She knelt beside him and kissed him on the cheek. "You just about ready to go?" she asked.

Jack made a face. "I'm on call for another two hours but I'll be home when I can get away. You alright? I heard what happened, I was just talking to Rachel about it." Rachel noticed the way he touched her arm intimately and the unconscious way he fingered something under his shirt with his free hand.

"Kind of rattled," she admitted. "Would I look really stupid in hanging around so my fiancée can take me home?"

He leaned in to kiss her. "I'll harass Mike about leaving early. He loves you, you know. Called you his daughter-in-law yesterday. I've been riding him about the fact you must be the first woman he cared about without it being sexual in his whole life."

Gabrielle beamed. "Great! Well, I'll see if I can find something to do. No sense in sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I never understood how you could stand being on call."

"Ah, how quickly the NUMs forget the joy of shift work," he teased. He kissed her again briefly and let her go. He turned back to Rachel, who understandably was looking very stupid. "That's what I was trying to say. It's nothing personal, I'm just not a big fan of infidelity."

Rachel went red. She'd just hit on her manager's fiancée. "I'm so sorry. I thought – I mean, I asked Dan and he said –"

"Yeah, that sounds like something Dan would say. Gabby has issues with insecurity and infidelity – I know why and she's a lot better about it than she used to be, but Dan thinks it's hilarious to tell women I'm single to make her squirm." Impulsively, he leaned over and squeezed her hand. She looked mortified. "Look, I'm sure you're a great kid and all but – not going to happen."

Great, Rachel thought as Jack left to answer a page. He just called me a kid. Which was almost meant in the context of 'kid sister'.

On Jack's way out, he came across Zoe, Von and a stranger going over various bottles of chemicals on the front desk. "Am I the only one freaked out by the stranger sniffing stuff in the ED?"

The stranger proceeded to give Jack an explanation about some industrial chemical and how to reverse the effects – Jack never got further than knowing how his car worked as far as industrial chemicals went. "Learnt this on your tractor, did you?" he asked.

"Yeah, that and medical school," the stranger retorted. He decided he didn't like this arrogant surgeon.

"Whatever. And you are…?"

"Steve Taylor."

Jack started to cough. "I'm sorry, the Steve Taylor? From a farm in south Queensland?"

Steve looked perplexed as to how Jack knew that. "How did you know that?"

"Humph." Jack walked off.

Steve turned to Von and Zoe. "I'm sorry, how does he know that?"

"He's been bad-mouthing you for the last year. As far as he's concerned, you're a user of women, a bad lay and, most importantly, the man who broke his fiancée's heart," Zoe filled Steve in, wondering how much of it was Jack's possessiveness of Gabrielle because the man didn't seem that bad. Or maybe he had just changed.

Steve frowned. He'd noticed the ring on Gabrielle's finger but since it was on her right hand… "Yeah, apparently it's something they do in Europe and Jack's part-Russian."

"He's not her type," Steve dismissed the relationship. "No way would she ever marry an arrogant surgeon. Probably can't keep it in his pants, either." The irony of that last part was lost on neither Zoe or Von.

"I don't know, they've been together for about a year now and he's pretty devoted to her. Reversed his reputation overnight basically."

"What reputation?"

Zoe laughed. "If you get this position, you'll find out soon enough."

* * *

"I can't believe you're letting him stay with you!" Jack yelled.

"I can't believe you're being such a jerk about it!" Gabrielle yelled back. "He's an old friend, nothing more."

"Oh, an old friend you lost your virginity to and then screwed your best friend. Why don't I just track down Deanna and offer her our spare bedroom?"

"Oh, that is totally different. Steve was drunk when he did it. Deanna was just a bitch."

He glared at her. "I'm not staying here while he's here."

"Jack, don't be ridiculous. You know how I feel at staying at yours."

"Because me having your ex on the couch is so much less icky than you having your subordinate in the next room?" he challenged her. Maybe if he didn't see her for a bit it would be the incentive she needed to make Steve move on. "I'm going home."

"Yeah, that's how you deal with everything when you don't get your own way, you go home."

"We are supposed to be getting married, Gabrielle. I want a home with you. I don't want to share it with your ex." And with that he was gone.

"…Can't say I blame him," Steve said later that night over beers. "I wouldn't have taken well to have an ex sleeping on your couch, either."

"I didn't have an ex, Steve. It was just you."

Steve smiled whimsically. "Yeah, I know. I remember how you were that first time – Christ, you were so stiff and you hated it, you only get that kind of response from a virgin… what's wrong? You look pale."

"Nothing," she said. Steve's recounting of their first time together seemed a whole lot less innocent knowing what she did about Jack. She knew that by Jack's standards, he had raped her, because rape extended to not being in a position to give informed consent, which included being drunk at the time. While Gabrielle didn't share his view exactly, she knew she had grown to expect a much higher standard of sexual integrity than what Steve had offered.

"What do you see in him?" Steve asked. "He just seems… I would never have picked you to be marrying a city-born surgeon."

"He's really sweet, he just – you got his shackles up and I don't know if you'll ever get them down now. I had a lot of issues with trust and infidelity and he was so good about it, more patient than anyone has a right to ask."

"I guess I was responsible for a lot of those issues," Steve said ruefully.

"Yeah, you were."

"For what it's worth… I've hated myself since for it. I tracked you pretty well but one day you just took off. Your parents knew you were in Sydney but they didn't know where… the last I heard was that you had a great boyfriend who's only flaw was being a Sydney boy through-and-through. They refused to give me your contact details so I wouldn't come down and try to screw things up."

Gabrielle laughed. That was such a typical thing for her dad to say. "Jack has this thing with what he refers to as bullshit conservatism – good old Joh Bjelke-Petersen epitomized it and you know my dad isn't that far behind. God, he tried so hard to rein it in and he mostly succeeded, so now dad thinks Jack's almost as conservative as he is. Meanwhile, Jack's pretty homophobic but he was just about ready to go join the Mardi Gras out of spite."

"What's the story there? He seems to like Charlotte well enough."

"I forgot you had such a good knack for picking up gossip. And you know with men it's only homophobia when you're talking about gays, with lesbians it's the ultimate fantasy." She knew she was saying too much but she couldn't help herself, she was having a lot of fun with Steve, more than she could ever have imagined herself having with him. He had changed, knew he had done things wrong, and more to the point, had so far not hit on her. The old Steve wouldn't have passed up any opportunity, even when she did have a fiancée.

Steve. He had broken her heart but now that he was here and she had a few beers in her, it didn't seem that bad. After all, she hadn't done too badly out of it, had she? She had a great job in a city she'd always dreamed of seeing and a fiancée who was crazy about her and maybe it was time to let bygones be bygones.

Steve restrained himself from frowning openly. She was thinking about him. The arrogant prick of as surgeon who had slept with half the hospital, so the gossip went. He bet Gabrielle's parents didn't know that detail. Steve contemplated getting it back to them. He was still pally with her youngest sister (had slept with her when he was drunk, too, but Gabrielle had never found out about that) maybe he could mention it to her.

He missed her. He missed her more than he could ever have thought possible. He had cursed the day he'd slept with Ashley. She hadn't been his first – he found Gabrielle to be frustratingly passive in bed – but she had been the only one he was caught out at. God, he should have been more discreet.

And now here she was, with a ring on her finger and a smile on her face as she prattled about Jack. He hated the prick more with each passing second.

He got his opportunity the next evening. Jack was still refusing to stay over while Steve was there, and Steve had procured some very fine pot. "I can't believe you got this after two days of living here," she giggled. "Two days and I was wandering into Cougars looking for some company."

"I have some mates who have moved here," he said.

She took a deep drag. "God, if there's one thing I've missed about you, it's this. Jack is so anti-drugs, I think he'd leave me if he found out about this."

"But it's OK for him to get a lesbian pregnant while drunk?" Steve retorted. "What's his story, anyway?"

Gabrielle giggled. She was in a confessional mood. "He did a lot of speed and pot at uni until the Dean invoked the morality clause on his scholarship. He –"

"I'm sorry, Jack had a morality clause on his scholarship?"

Another giggle. "Yep. It included board and a stipend. You practically have to be a member of MENSA just to qualify. I mean, seriously, not having to worry about a job or accommodation? So they could be kind of picky about the conditions they let people in on." Steve glowered. He definitely wasn't a member of MENSA. "Anyway, the Dean invoked his morality clause which forced him to clean up his act and he's been anti-drugs ever since."

Steve was fed up with hearing about what a loser Jack Quade was. Not only was he an arrogant surgeon who'd slept with half the women in the hospital, but he had a history or drug abuse in his past? After all, it was one think to drink and get stoned once in a while, it was another to be relying on speed to get you through uni. This was the guy Gabrielle was set to marry?

He kissed Gabrielle. She was too stoned to be fully aware of what was happening. He pushed himself down on her and she kissed him back, vaguely aware that this didn't feel like Jack. She knew Jack's body intimately, knew every curve, every line and something was off… she felt the stubble on Steve's face scrape against her cheek and she knew Jack never let it get like this, he hated looking scruffy. She knew something was wrong about the pressure of his hands on her body, the way his tongue was thrashing around in her mouth… "Jack, ease up," she mumbled.

"Steve," Steve corrected. Slip of the tongue, he decided. He was too out of it himself to really judge the situation, which was that he was mauling someone too drunk and stoned to fully realize she wasn't with her fiancée. He pushed her skirt up around to waist and pulled her panties down, probing her lazily until he was hard enough to penetrate her.

"Jack stop, you're hurting," Gabrielle cried out as soon as he penetrated her. God, it hadn't hurt like this since the time he had raped her. "You promised," she said, which Steve didn't understand.

"Steve," he corrected her again, and started pumping her.

"Jack," she repeated, then in horror, "Oh, God, Jack."

Jack, having let himself in with the key she'd given him soon after they'd gotten together, was staring at them in absolute horror. He'd come to apologize, only to find them screwing on the couch. "Steve, get off me," she instructed, but Steve was too out of it to stop.

As drunk and stoned as she was, she would never forget the look on Jack's face. Horror changed to anguish, which changed to disgust. Within five seconds he had his engagement ring off his finger and on top of the TV. The look of disgust and betrayal he gave her spoke louder than words. He walked out.

Gabrielle thought for a second about going after him but a shock like that tends to have a very sobering effect on people and she knew in the mood he was in right now, the beating he had given her on the night he'd raped her would be nothing compared to what he was capable of doing now. Steve tried to hug her, but she pushed him away. "LEAVE ME ALONE!" she screamed, although she knew she was as much to blame. "YOU RUINED EVERYTHING! I HATE YOU!"


	9. Chapter 9

"Rebecca, please, let me explain."

"Fuck you."

"But he needs to know –"

Rebecca turned the full brunt of her anger in Gabrielle's direction. "He needs to know what? Why you cheated on him? Fuck you." She started to walk off.

Gabrielle had gotten a call from Rebecca two days after Jack had walked out that she was coming by the ED to pick up the things Jack had left at her house – a few changes of clothes, books – it was amazing what you accumulated over a year. She had hoped it would be an opportunity to talk to the younger woman but Rebecca had been full of venom. Given she was only twenty, there was a lot of loyalty and dignity in her, loyalty and dignity Gabrielle knew she hadn't possessed that night Jack had walked in on them.

Jack. She couldn't believe she had let Steve kiss her, take her clothes off, have sex with her… but then, she was to blame as well. They had both been too out of it to know what they were doing… and she should have known what she was doing, because she had been mature enough and committed enough to one person to agree to marry them.

"Bec, please, I need to explain –"

"You come near either of us again and I will break your neck, do you understand that you _filthy whore_!" She screamed the last three words loud enough for everyone to hear.

"Bec, you need to go," Charlotte said, placing a reassuring hand on Rebecca's arm.

"Don't worry, I don't want to be breathing the same air as that whore any longer than I have to," Rebecca said. Then her face softened. "I'm sorry, Char, I didn't meant to take it out on you. I want to do the best by him… maybe you can come around for dinner? He's pretty upset." Charlotte understood that pretty upset included drinking something chronic and having a new girl over every night. Rebecca was glad she had recently moved into her own apartment with a spare room (actually, Jack paid the extra rent so he could have somewhere to crash when he came over and they inevitably drank too much), her father wouldn't have put up with it.

"I understand. Do you know if he's using condoms?" It was a question that had to be asked.

"Yeah. I confronted him about it – it's one of those things that's hardwired into his brain, thank god." If Jack was going to engage in destructive behaviour, at least he was being careful about it. She laughed bitterly and had to explain to Charlotte the irony of destructive behaviour being careful.

Rebecca put down the box so she could hug Jack. "You have been an awesome friend," she said.

"It's only what he's been to me."

When Rebecca left, Charlotte glared at Gabrielle. "Not. A. Word. I don't care why you did it. I only care that my best friend is now drinking too much and sleeping around after the people who care about him spent a year getting him over that issue. And we thought you were one of us."

Charlotte had already known about Gabrielle and Jack, she had called Charlotte at home to inform her. Charlotte had had the good grace not to mention anything until now but since Rebecca had come in and made it public knowledge when Gabrielle had tried to talk to her, it didn't matter anymore. Gabrielle and Jack's relationship had gone up in flames after he'd walked in on her and Steve having sex. The ED was completely silent; the gossip would come later.

When Gabrielle fled to her office, Charlotte collapsed onto the front desk with laughter so hysterical that Zoe was worried about her. "Nothing," she said. "Just that Gabrielle was stupid enough to OK Steve working here. I bet everyone's regretting that decision now. Especially Frank."

"Especially Gabrielle," Zoe added, knowing what it felt like to be driven to infidelity.

* * *

"I heard about you and Gabrielle. I'm so sorry."

Jack smiled ruefully. It had been nice of Rachel to track him to the surgeon's lounge, it was more than most of his so-called friends in the ED had managed. There were Dan and Erica, of course. And Charlotte had come through like the big sister he'd come to think of her as. And even Frank had managed to contrive a meeting in the hall. But the rank and file…

Not that he really blamed them. He didn't make friends easily and something like this – he was in a worse position reputation-wise than he had been before he'd started dating her. Now he was a cuckold.

Steve Taylor at least had the good sense to avoid him like the plague. Clever man. Jack was tempted to break his neck. Although he knew the man was only half to blame. Gabrielle had been a willing enough participant, even if she had been drunk and stoned.

God, what had she been thinking? To let him touch her like that, to let him stick it to her – whatever thoughts he'd had of jumping after Patrick's death and paled in comparison to Gabrielle's betrayal. She had been the only thing that had gotten him through and to find out she was no better than a whore…

"I'm sorry, it hasn't been the best of days for me," Jack admitted. "You still want to go for that drink?"

So they had drinks and he told her a lot about himself – about his physically and emotionally abuse step-mother, about his alcoholic and physically abusive father. He left out Patrick, of course. Deep down, he knew Rachel would never mean enough to him that he would tell her about Patrick.

Naturally, he garnered her sympathy. To have someone as sweet as Jack abused because he represented another man's infidelity… "I think it was so good of you, the way you didn't go after Steve," she confided.

Jack shrugged. "She chose to have sex with him. I don't know what possessed her but she made up her mind. I saw what my dad's infidelities did to Stella and how Stella held me responsible because she didn't have the guts to admit she had a lousy husband, and I vowed I would never hold anyone else responsible for our relationship problems."

She reached out and squeezed his hand. "I think that's very noble," she said.

He resisted the urge to kiss her. He knew she still had a crush on him and that she was sending out all the signs of availability. But he hadn't fallen that low as to sleep with a colleague who he knew was infatuated with him. Yet.

* * *

"Promise… you'll be good to yourself."

"I promise." Jack gripped Travis's hand, wishing he could give him some of his strength – not that he had much right now. Gabrielle's infidelity had shaken him. Travis knew about it, and had been devastated about the break-up of the relationship. He had help up Jack and Gabrielle as a symbol of hope, that people could go through what Patrick had put them through and still be happy.

He had requested Gabrielle in his dying hours, and Jack had complied. He couldn't deny Travis anything, not now. So here she was, sitting beside him, waiting for Travis to die. "Promise… you'll forgive her. She loves you so much. She always has."

Jack wasn't aware Travis had been so astute to their relationship. He looked into the younger man's eyes and realized he couldn't deny him that, no when he had perhaps minutes to life. He took Gabrielle's hand and kissed her on the cheek. "I promise," he said, and her heart soared.

"I took so much joy out of watching you together. I… Jack, I know you don't like to be watched, but I loved watching you together. She loves you so much. I always wanted someone to love me like that. My parents, Patrick, girlfriends…" He took a ragged breath.

Jack drew Gabrielle into him and was surprised at how good she felt. His heart ached for her. "I know," he said, reliving all those years of women rejecting him because of his self-hatred.

"I always wanted someone like her."

"I know. I promise. I swear to God, as soon as I get the rings back, I'll –" but it was over. Travis was gone. Jack let go of Gabrielle's hand, leant over the body of his friend and sobbed brokenly in a way Gabrielle had never heard before.

She tried to hug him. "Don't touch me!" he yelled.

"Jack, what you just said –"

"What, you can't recognize a bullshit dying promise when you hear it? Did you think I wouldn't bother telling him what he needed to hear in his last minutes? He needed a lie far more than you needed the truth, Gabrielle."

"But Jack – you couldn't have just said those things –"

"I did. And I want you to go now. Don't you remember when Mammy dies and Rhett lies to her about getting back with Scarlett to make her happy?"

"I know he did end up with her in the end."

She was ruining his analogy. "Get out!" he yelled. "Get out before I call the police. Can't you get it through your thick head? I. Don't. Want. To. See. You. Again."

Shaking, Gabrielle left the room, passing Rachel as she headed back to the ED. "Listen, do you think you could talk to him?" she asked distractedly. "He seems fond of you and he shouldn't be alone right now."

"Of course." Rachel let herself into the room where Jack was still crying. "It's only me," she said softly. "I can go if you'd like but I thought maybe you'd like the company."

"Thanks. You're sweet. You've always been… sweet."

She sat down next to him and patted his back. "Do you want me to get you anything?" she asked. "Water, a coffee?"

"No thanks. If you could just…" He pulled her into his lap and buried his head in her neck like he'd done so many times with Gabrielle. He was too out of it, too in need for female comfort to care what he was doing. Rachel was shocked to have him crying like this but also… she knew she shouldn't be taking any pleasure out of his misery but she never would have gotten so close to him otherwise.

"It's OK," she said over and over.

She was shocked when he raised his head to kiss her. Shocked… and thrilled. God, he was a good kisser and the taste of his tears just added to the intensity of the moment. "Do you want to come over?" he asked in a ragged breath.

She blushed. She knew exactly what Jack was asking of her. But it was what she'd wanted from the first day she'd met him. "Sure," she agreed.

* * *

"Jack, I need to know this isn't about Gabrielle," Rachel said breathlessly. He was kissing her against the door because it had taken him too long to find his house keys and he'd decided he couldn't wait any longer. If she'd known he'd kissed Gabrielle in his driveway for the same reason over a year before, it might have been enough to make her change her mind. Although it was hard to think about anything else when Jack was kissing you, touching you, wedging your body between his and something hard so you could feel every muscle in his body against yours…

"Of course it's not," he replied, just as breathlessly. "I dumped her, remember?" He didn't add that he'd dumped her after she'd shattered his heart by being with another guy. "Look, Travis wanted me to get back with her and I would have done anything for the guy, but I just couldn't. I don't love her anymore."

He did such a convincing job of saying that that Rachel bough it. She let Jack go back to kissing her as he tried to locate his keys. He finally did, and let them into the house.

Dan was up, watching a DVD with Erica. Rachel blushed a little to see her two colleagues there. She'd never done this sort of thing before and to have them know exactly what they were up to…Jack laced his fingers through Rachel's and began leading her towards his room.

"Mate," Dan said in a low voice, "can I speak to you for a second? In private?"

Jack gave Rachel a quick kiss. "Down the hall, first left. I'll be with you in a minute." He saw Rachel off then turned to Dan. "What?" he asked crossly.

"Don't do this. Send her home. If you want to get laid, go to a bar and pick up someone who doesn't give a shit about you. Or better yet, go make up with Gabrielle. But Rachel's infatuated with you. This isn't right."

Jack crossed his arms over his chest stubbornly. "I haven't promised her anything, she's here of her own free will."

"I'm going to go talk to her."

Jack blocked his path. "You do and I'll break your neck," he snapped. Dan backed off. Jack looked half-crazy with grief and loss – both of Travis and Gabrielle – and he decided it was best not to clash with him. Besides, if Rachel was so in love with him that she didn't think twice about going to be with him – well, someone that stupid was bound to get her heart broken eventually.

"Sorry about that," Jack said a minute later. He entered his room to find her sitting primly on his bed. She smiled at him nervously and he sat down beside her, taking her hand. Then he positioned himself behind her so he could kiss the back of her neck, running his hands up and down her back until she was whimpering.

"Jack, I've never done this before," she admitted. "I mean, I have, but… not like this."

_"You. You're cute. You don't have much experience with men, do you?"_ He couldn't help but remember that first night together when she'd been so nervous, so awkward but so charmingly eager to please him. He scowled. "It's OK," he said. "Too much experience can be a turn-off anyway."

They started making out and things progressed quickly. He knew how to press her buttons to make her want him… he knew how to press women's buttons in general. And if he closed his eyes he could think, for a second, that he was with Gabrielle, that it was Gabrielle under him, Gabrielle's legs wrapped around him, Gabrielle running her hands up and down his back… When he was done he cried into her neck again and she held him. "It's OK," she said soothingly. "He must have meant a lot to you." If she had known he was crying as much for the loss of his relationship with Gabrielle as the loss of his relationship with Travis…

He had her five times in total before she was partly grateful he drove himself to exhaustion. He was devastating in bed but she needed to get some sleep. She fell asleep in his arms, thinking this was the best thing that had happened to her in a while.

* * *

"Saw you leave with Jack last night," Steve said smugly as he and Rachel attended a man who'd fallen on a chainsaw. He'd rushed off to tell Gabrielle about it as soon as he saw. For her own good and all. She blushed and nodded slightly. "Have a good time?"

"Yes, we did." Jack had been dead to the world when she'd woken up but she'd extracted his number out of the contact listings and sent him a message.

"You're just the last of his conquests, you know. Gabby was telling me he did it all the time."

"He managed to be with her for a year, didn't he? And _you_ can talk about conquests." But Steve's talk rattled her. Word was leaking out about how Jack was using alcohol and women to ease his pan. He had told her last night hadn't been about Gabrielle, but…

_No_, she decided. You didn't just cry in someone's arms after you'd had sex with them and have it not mean anything. She'd wait until Jack arrived and he'd be sweet like he was last night.

She stopped dead when she came face-to-face with Gabrielle. The older woman was too professional to create a scene, but she looked in her eyes and shivered. She had gone to Jack as a favour to a friend and ended up in bed with him. Some friend.

She _cheated_ on him, Rachel reminded herself, determined to hold her head up high. She doesn't exactly have a claim on him.

Jack was cool towards her when he arrived and as the day wore on she realized last night had meant nothing to him. She asked Erica about him, who confirmed that Jack was normally such a great guy. Erica didn't add that she shared Dan's opinion that going to be with him under the circumstances hadn't been the greatest of ideas. "Yeah, well why is he being such a prick?" she asked.

He finally bothered to find time for her at the end of the day, by which time, she didn't want to know him. "Why'd you sleep with me?" she asked. "Do you even know? Because I get the feeling I just happened to be there. God, if you just wanted to get laid, you should have picked up someone in a bar who didn't give a shit about you. Or was this your way of getting back at Gabrielle? A random hookup is too discreet for you?"

"No, of course not," Jack said, although he had to admit, he'd taken pleasure from the look on Gabrielle's face. Well, they had broken up. It wasn't like he had _cheated_ on her or something. "Listen, last night wasn't a one-way thing. You wanted me too, remember?"

Yes, she had wanted him. And he'd pushed all her buttons so she would have done anything he'd asked. Too much experience was a turn-off? Now it certainly was. Jack knew his way around the bedroom like a seasons prostitute and she understood why now. The thought she had been the last of – what, hundreds, thousands? – disgusted her. "Well, you have certainly cured me of that, Doctor Quade," she spat.

"You know what? You're being jeuvenile."

_He_ was screwing his exes staff and _she_ was being jeuvenile? "What happened to me being a great person?" she asked sarcastically.

"Well, we have to work together, so we may as well figure out a way to do that."

"How about this? You don't talk to me and I don't talk to you. Easy."

But Jack wasn't quite done humiliating either Rachel or Gabrielle. The following week, a woman was brought in, the victim of being bashed by her husband after she had spent the night with another guy. At first, Rachel had been sympathetic, telling Mercedes it wasn't her fault, that she had been vulnerable and some men could sense that… before realizing that man was Jack Quade. That she had suggested he randomly pick women up in bars the week before was not lost on her.

She couldn't work with him. She couldn't trust him and she couldn't work with someone she didn't trust and she told Gabrielle that. "I'm sorry, to lose you," was all Gabrielle had to say on the matter, and she found herself meaning it. She knew Rachel hadn't been malicious in going to be with him, just a sweet, infatuated girl under the impression he gave a shit about her. In a way, it was better for Jack to be targeting women in bars.

"If it's worth anything… he still loves you. I tried to tell myself he was just upset about losing Travis… but I think he was more upset about losing you. He all by called me Gabrielle while he was doing it. I don't understand why he can't just forgive you."

"Gabby," she responded absently. "He always called me Gabby. Or farmgirl. Jack's the result of an affair his dad had. He grew up with his step-mother hating him and he vowed he would never tolerate infidelity in his relationships, either in himself or his partner. He may still love me but he can't forgive me. And he won't accept the pot as mitigating circumstances either because he's so anti-drugs." Rachel left her feeling deeply sorry for her. It had been a stupid thing to do but for Jack to walk away from everything they shared…

Jack confronted her on her leaving as she was walking out the door. "I'm really sorry," he said.

A woman was in hospital and he was sorry? "You're going to have to do better than that," she said.

"Look, I'm not feeling very articulate at the moment."

"I wonder why."

"Hey! It's not my fault she's in here."

"No. It was her decision to cheat on her husband and his decision to react the way he did." But she couldn't shake the feeling of disgust. If she had known how much effort Jack had gone to in order to understand Gabrielle and know that he reasons for sleeping with him were the right ones that first night together, she would have been even more disgusted. He had fallen so far from the man he had been eighteen months ago.

"Yeah, yeah, it was."

"So you won't have to lose any sleep over it."

She kept walking away from him, so Jack grabbed her arm and wrenched her around to face him. "I'm not proud of what I've done," he said.

She relented a little. "I can see that," she admitted. "Look, I'm usually a pretty good judge of character and I didn't take you for a player. You still love her, don't you?" It was a long pause before Jack nodded. "You were thinking about her while you were screwing me, weren't you?" An even longer pause before he nodded again. She couldn't hate him for it like she had last week. He was miserable. "Jack, you have to sort this out. You can't keep going on like this." And she walked away, leaving behind that chapter of her life.

Jack handed in his notice that day. The following week, Steve left the hospital and his troubled relationship with Gabrielle in a haze of alcoholic stupor, and Gabrielle found out she was pregnant.


	10. Chapter 10

"Pick up the phone, Jack," Dan said impatiently. For the past week Jack had bee living in an alcoholic stupor, occasionally going out to feel sorry for himself somewhere else. Dan felt deeply for him but he wished he would do something about it rather than just moping.

Gabrielle wasn't taking his departure well, and now that Steve Taylor had walked out they were desperately short of manpower. And Jack's former landlady, Mary had been admitted. Problems with her pacemaker. And she was under the impression Jack still worked at the hospital. Since Jack wasn't available, she refused to calm down until she spoke to Gabrielle. "Where is he?" she demanded.

"I don't know. Dan's trying to get hold of him."

Mary eyed her suspiciously. "What do you mean, you don't know? You're his girlfriend."

"We broke up."

"Broke up? Why?" Jack adored her, you could tell by the way he was around her, the way he talked about her when he wasn't around her… why had they broken up?

"If you must know, I cheated on him. It was only once and I was stoned so don't look at me like that. I've been through the wringer as it is." _And I'm pregnant_. The baby Jack had wanted so much… when she had told Frank the first thing he had asked was if she knew who the father was. A fair question given the circumstances, but a humiliating one. Of course she knew who the father was. The timing… her mind raced back to the day Patrick had died and how the thought of getting her pregnant seemed like the only thing that kept him together. Well, he had certainly outdone himself that night. And now she was going to have their baby and she had no idea what to do.

Frank had pointed out that if he still loved her, it might be the push he needed to get back with her. Gabrielle had shaken her head sadly at that. She loved him desperately but didn't want him under those circumstances. She knew how wary he was of getting married on account of pregnancy, knew even if he could be made to make that commitment, he'd resent her for it. She'd rather not have him at all.

"So?" Mary asked. "You're good for him. Make him take you back."

"It's not that easy. You know how proud he is and you know how stubborn he is."

"But you still love him?" Gabrielle nodded sadly. Mary pursed her lips. She was getting through to that proud, stubborn man if it killed her. She had seen the light come into Jack's eyes in the time he had been dating her. Mary hadn't liked that Deanna, but Gabrielle was something else.

"I can't believe you quit! I can't believe you broke up with her!" Mary yelled at him the second he walked in.

"She cheated on me!" Jack yelled back. He couldn't believe he was forced to have this conversation so publicly. Damn Gabrielle for telling Mary.

"So? It's not like you're a saint. Go back to her and beg her to take you back."

"No! Not only did I catch her screwing someone else but he's a colleague, everyone knows." Actually, everyone knew because Rebecca had gotten into a public screaming match with her but that was beside the point.

"So you're embarrassed, is that it?" Mary challenged him. "Could you forgive her if she hadn't embarrassed you?" From behind the curtain, Frank grinned. Maybe Mary being readmitted was just what Jack needed. It hadn't been five minutes and already she was pulling holes in his arguments.

"No!" Why did she have to be like this? Everyone else got his right to hate her forever (even though he still loved her) and publicly humiliate her with his conquests the same way she had done to him. That everyone else was just too scared to incur his temper was lost on Jack. He tried to rein in his temper. "Look, every time I see her, I think about it. And it breaks my heart all over again."

Frank frowned. Not so good.

"Oh, Jack… why do you have to be so stubborn about this? She loves you. No-one's loved you the way she does, have they?" Jack shook his head. Not his parents, not any of his girlfriends, not even the friends and sister who cared about him deeply and were worried about the downward spiral Jack had found himself in. "You're never going to have that with anyone else. Why can't you see that."

They talked for a long time, and Mary finally got him to open up about his abuse. "When it happened, it felt like I was reliving it all over again. I felt… dead inside."

"Oh, Jack." She reached out to stroke his hair. "I wish I could have been there when you were young. I wish I could have protected you. Maybe that's why we liked each other too much. We were too busy surviving other people's bad behaviour to really live ourselves."

Jack sniffled. "Maybe."

"And Gabrielle was there for you the whole time?"

"Mary, I don't want to get into this."

"Was she?" Jack nodded. It went beyond even her being there for him – she had forgiven some pretty awful things. Jack still felt physically ill to think about it. But it didn't erase the image of Steve on top of her from his mind. "Jack, you have to forgive her. You'll never be happy with anyone else like you're happy with her."

"I don't know how to," he admitted.

He saw Mary off to surgery and wandered around for a bit, noting how chaotic the ED was. He asked Bart what had happened; Steve Taylor walked out, he replied. Good riddance to bad rubbish, he thought. Jack suggested Bart take the opportunity to fill Steve's position. "I thought about that. They need a registrar," Bart said regretfully.

Jack started to think. And think. He'd meant what he'd said to Mary about not wanting to be a surgeon, but what she had said, about how happy being a doctor made him – he remembered a time when he could come home weary to the bone and still be happy.

He approached Frank about returning to the ED. "I need a doctor who won't bring his personal problems to work," Frank said gruffly, secretly over the moon that he had both found a replacement for Steve and that Jack was showing signs of moving out of his depression.

"I won't," he said. "I mean, I've got it sorted."

"Will you go to counseling?"

"If that's what it takes."

"What about Gabrielle?"

Jack sighed. "I've thought about that. I'm not happy with having to work with her. But… I need to be around my friends. I don't want to have to start over, not with how vulnerable I feel right now. I – I miss people. I even miss you, Frank."

"When can you start?" Frank asked. Jack smiled.

* * *

Somehow, they had ended up on the same case, and they were both convinced Frank had something to do with it. So now they were traipsing through the carpark, looking for this stupid car and this stupid dog. "Hang on… you forgot to ask her what kind of dog it was," he said accusingly.

"Well… so did you! Honestly. Well… anyway. Dogs, they're like their owners."

"Yeah, I've heard all about your pet Rottweiler," Jack could resist teasing.

Gabrielle glared at him, but without much conviction. "Amway, dogs, they're like their owners. It will be some nervous little chiwawa, some – oh, my God!" she screamed in fright and jumped back. Into his arms. He automatically wrapped them around her to steady her.

"_That's_ a nervous chiwawa," Jack smirked. He suddenly became aware that he'd held her after she was steady. She felt good in his arms and his instincts said to pull her into his and maybe start nuzzling her neck… he let her go.

Gabrielle felt rattled by the chemistry that had surged through them when they'd touched. Like that first night when just brushed against her arm sent jolts of electricity through her body. For a second everything had faded away and it was just them. "Let's go," she said, stepping away from Jack, you know, just in case she lost her balance again. She realized if Jack had put his arms about an inch lower, if he was familiar enough with her body, he may have been able to feel the difference.

"You did well today," she conceded in the tea room as she was going through her rosters. Frank and Zoe were having a pow-wow in the office and it really wasn't big enough for three.

"Thanks." He handed her a cup of tea. Lots of milk and sugar, just the way she liked it. "It's good to be back. I missed this place. I even missed Frank."

She grinned. "You're making that up."

"I am not. He's a good boss, for all that he can drive you batty." He shrugged. "I just needed to be around people who knew people… people who loved me. I couldn't take the thought of having to start all over again." His phone beeped and he made a face. "That's my stupid reminder for my stupid counseling session. I'll see you around, OK?" And he left, leaving her feeling bewildered at just how well he had taken to her… and hope that maybe if he could forgive her as a human being, maybe he could forgive her in other capacities.

She was woken up at two in the morning by pounding on her door. Who the hell was it at this hour?

She stared at a very drunk Steve. Oh no. Not now. Not when Jack was actually being nice to her. "Gabby, I want to quit," he sobbed brokenly, and she realized he wasn't drunk but in violent withdrawal. "But I need your help. Please. I can't do it without you."

She let him in. No matter what had happened between them, she couldn't abandon him when he needed her.

* * *

"You look exhausted. Didn't sleep well?" There was something that sounded almost like concern in his voice.

Gabrielle yawned. "Steve came over." She realized as soon as she'd said it she should have lied. No, she shouldn't have. She was going to get nowhere lying to him. "It's not what you think."

Jack shrugged. "It's not of my business what the two of you do," he said, although there was a tenseness in his body that suggested he felt otherwise. So she was still seeing the bastard, was she? And things had gone so well between them yesterday. Thank God he hadn't made an ass off himself and kissed her like he'd wanted to.

"He's an alcoholic, Jack. I hadn't seen him for two weeks and then he showed up… he needs help."

"There's this little thing called Alcoholics Anonymous," he said.

"There's a little thing called friendship," she retorted. "Sorry, I didn't mean to snap. I'm tired."

"It's OK. My counseling session didn't go to well yesterday. I have a lot to work through."

Impulsive she reached over and squeezed his hand. "I know you do. And you're doing great." She smiled encouragingly at him. She wanted to remind him that she had once promised to always be there for him, weather they were together or not, but she knew it was too soon.

Charlotte could have kicked herself for choosing that moment to walk into the tea room. They had all been holding their breaths in anticipation of Jack's return to the ED and how he would take to Gabrielle. And he had taken to her surprisingly well, as if he had decided to let bygones be bygones. And just a day later they were holding hands and she was smiling at him and he wasn't exactly looking unhappy about that…

Jack jumped up. "I, uh, have stuff to do," he mumbled, and bolted out of the room.

Charlotte sat down. "Sorry," she said guiltily.

"It's OK. I'm just glad he's talking to me."

"Do you think he could ever…?"

"I don't know. I think he still loves me but I don't know if he loves me enough to forget." She bit her lip and felt the tears start. "Charlotte, I'm pregnant – and yes, it's his, I've already been through that with Frank – and if he can't work it out before I start to show… I don't want him taking me back because of the baby. I don't want him to love me for its sake."

"I'll help you," Charlotte said quietly. She'd had her doubts before about Gabrielle's integrity but there it was. She wasn't willing to use the child he wanted so much to get him back, didn't even want him if it was under those circumstances. "I'm his best friend and I know he misses you."

"Thankyou," she said gratefully. "Um… Steve's back. He wants to dry out and he needs my help. I can't deny him that."

Charlotte groaned. Of all the things to happen. "Jack needs to know."

"He already does. I was just telling him."

"… I don't get why he has to go to her," Jack complained to Charlotte over drinks at her place later. "It's not like she's qualified or anything."

"Methinks you have a touch of the green-eyed monster," she said.

"I am not jealous. And I'm not mad, either. Although I think I have a right to be. He screwed her. You know what my mind keeps going back to?" Charlotte shook her head. "When I walked in and they were going at it, I focused on her engagement ring. Like she didn't have enough goddamn respect for me to take it off before she cheated on me."

"Jack, I don't think she thought like that. I don't think she was thinking at all."

He sighed. "I know she wasn't think that, it's just how it felt." His face contorted in a look of such pain that it was obvious he still loved her. "Yesterday she was frightened by this dog and she fell into my arms and I wanted to kiss her so much and then the next thing I thought of was that stupid ring."

"Oh, Jack. Just give it time." But not too much. "It will stop hurting after a while… or at least ease up. I promise."

* * *

"So there I was, lying through my teeth and I realized I had just made everything about myself up to impress a guy. I was so ashamed," Zoe concluded her story. She, Charlotte, Erica, Dan, Bart, Jack and Gabrielle were at Cougars having drinks.

"Jack can do a really good impression of a Catholic Virgin," Gabrielle piped up, nursing her one beer after Zoe had commented she never saw Gabrielle drinking anymore.

"Really?" Charlotte asked, interest piqued. "Because that would imply –"

"That I ever was either?" Jack offered to everyone's laughter. "Thanks. Nice to know what my friends think of me." Charlotte poked her tongue out at him. He poked his back. He was in a good mood. The last few weeks had gone by in a flurry of patients and he and Gabrielle were something akin to friends. She'd mentioned Steve twice, once to say he'd started AA and a second time to say he'd moved out. He couldn't admit it to her, but he was pleased to hear it.

"There was this one time that I –" Bart started to say, but Charlotte waved him silent.

"No, I want to hear more about this Catholic virgin thing," she said, amused by the idea.

"My step-grandmother was this real religious nut and convinced I was going to hell – child of adultery and all that. I learnt very quickly to tell her what she wanted to hear and act the way she wanted me to act. I developed a lifelong hobby of taking the piss out of religious people without them realizing. Jenny made Terri look like a liberal when it came to sex so it was easier to do that than horrify her."

Charlotte laughed. "Every so often I understand a little better why you hate religion," she said. "Who's Jenny?"

"Farmgirl's mum." Everyone but Jack picked up on the fact he'd just referred to her as farmgirl.

* * *

"Frank, I really need a job."

"No."

"Is it because of the alcohol thing? Because I swear I'm clean and you can test me every day if you like. I'll do the shit shifts, whatever, I don't care but if I can't get a job here, I have to go back to Queensland."

"It's not because of the alcohol – although that's a big part of it. But the biggie is that Jack's back in the ED and he won't be able to work with you." And even if he said he could and tried his hardest for the sake of being the bigger man, Frank knew it would just chip at the small amount of emotional stability he had built up since returning to the ED. And more than that, Jack and Gabrielle were getting along really well since his return. Nothing had happened between them per se but he had heard about the farmgirl reference and he could see with his own eyes the way he watched her. You didn't watch someone like that if you didn't long to be with them.

It was Jack's watching her that worried Frank. He had to know her body well, and it wouldn't be long before he worked it out. If Jack couldn't forgive her of his own accord before then…

"I'm sorry, OK. I'll write you a good reference and I won't mention the alcohol but I cannot have you upsetting Jack."

Steve's eyes went wide in comprehension. He knew there was a long list of people he needed to make up to for his drunken actions, and top of his list was Gabrielle. If cheating on her wasn't the first place, he had gotten her drunk and stoned and proceeded to have sex with her when she was engaged to another man. And at the time he'd been furious she kept calling her Jack. And… he'd hurt her doing it. The shame was almost too much to bear and it was easy to forget Jack in the equation.

"I hated him," Steve admitted. "I saw him as a threat, like she could ever love me that way. Turned out _I _was the threat to _him_. I've spoken to her but I can't bring myself to talk about what happened and I don't know if I can ever face him over it."

"You know they're meant to be together. If you ever want redemption, you know you have to square it with him so he takes her back. You can tell yourself otherwise all you like, but you won't be able to even start on forgiving yourself until you do that."

So a few days later Steve scrounged up the courage to show up at Dan and Jack's front door. Dan answered it. "Go to hell," he said, and tried to shut the door in Steve's face.

Steve wedged his foot in the door and forced his weight behind. He'd been expecting to have the door slammed in his face so he went for the element of surprise, pushing his way past a surprised Dan. "Hey! Get the hell out of this house! Or maybe I should just let Jack kill you."

"Quade! I know you're here, you're car's outside." This wasn't exactly how he had hoped it would go but he was here now and he was determined to say what he had come to say. "I'm not going until you talk to me."

"I'm calling the police," Dan said angrily.

"Dan, it's fine, I'll talk to him," Jack said tiredly. He resented his home being invaded by this jerk. It was the only place where he didn't have to pretend to be strong. He looked at Steve. He had kind of known Steve might try to apologize, it was part of the twelve steps. "Look, I'm not interested in your AA redemption bullshit so just say what you came to say and I'll pretend to listen and then go." Dan looked completely bug-eyed when Jack mentioned AA. "Look, I really don't want you to hear this so you think you can go for a walk or something?"

"I'm not leaving you alone with him, I know what you're temper's like," Dan said. As much as Steve deserved to be slugged, Dan would much rather his friend not be charged with assault… or murder. "I'll go to my room and stay there so long as I can't hear voices."

"Fine." Dan went. Jack faced Steve. "Out with it then get out."

"I'm sorry," he said meekly.

Jack had been trying to restrain himself and look like he didn't care, but Steve's apology was all he could take. "You're sorry?" he said indignantly. "You_ screw my fiancée_ and you're _sorry_? After the way you treated her – what, you couldn't stand her being happy with anyone else?"

"No," he admitted freely. "I was so jealous. I was jealous of you when her folks said she was engaged and when I met you – look, I was never going to like you. And when I heard about your reputation I couldn't stand seeing you touch her knowing there had been all these women before her. I… I knew what she could handle and I pushed her to do more than she could so I could take advantage of the situation. I – I mean, I know how you feel about rape and all that and my your standards, that's what I did."

"She looked aware enough of the situation to me," Jack snapped. But in his heart he knew Steve had a point. He couldn't go around bad-mouthing the guy for how many times he'd taken advantage of a drunk Gabrielle and not cut her some slack when she was stoned as well. And given his own hsitory with drugs... "She shouldn't have been doing drugs anyway."

"She was not aware of the situation. She kept calling me Jack. I was so pissed off about it at the time but now… it's something I'm going to have to live with. I can't make it up to her. She said – she said Jack, you're hurting. She didn't even know she was with me, or at least not fully."

The reference wasn't lost of Jack. She had been in a twilight zone, between knowing she was with Steve and reliving the hell Jack had put her through. If anything was going to affect Jac... "I want you to go," Jack said wearily. If he heard much more of this, he was going to break down again, and he'd been doing so well, too.

"You're an idiot, you know that. She loves you. I don't know why but she does. She still cries about Rachel. If I thought I had any chance in hell of getting back with you, I wouldn't be here. But all she does is talk about you. I can't ever make it up to you or her. But you're an idiot if you let her go."

"Get out or I'll call the police." Steve left and Jack collapsed onto the couch, trembling. "He's right, you know," Dan said, coming out from his room.

"How much of that did you hear?" Jack asked. All of it. "Damn it, Dan, I didn't want you to hear for a reason."

"What, you think I don't already know how humiliated you've been? Jack… the thing you have with her… you know this isn't like your dad and step-mum. She was so out of it she didn't realize she wasn't with you. How can you not get that?"

"I saw them. She wasn't fully coherent, I get that… but she wasn't passed out or fighting him either. She let him do it. I saw it."

"See, I think that's what the problem is. If you hadn't seen it I think you'd get it. Steve said it himself, but your standards he raped her. Maybe it would help if you looked at it in those terms." Better to hate Steve for the rest of his life than Gabrielle.

* * *

"Did I do something? "

"I'm sorry?" Gabrielle asked, looking up from where she was making coffee. She should cut down on the caffeine, she knew, it was bad for the baby. She pressed her hand against her stomach before turning to face him.

He was standing in the doorway and shut it behind him. "Was it something I did? Did I not pay you enough attention? Had some part of you not forgiven me for what I did to you? Were you having second thoughts about marrying me?"

"Oh, Jack, no. It wasn't anything you did."

"Then why?"

"I don't know why. We were talking and things got out of hand. If I could take it back I would."

"I know," he said, surprising her. It was the first concession he'd given to her remorse. "Were you really so out of it that you were calling him Jack? He told me, was over yesterday," he explained when she looked surprised. "Doing his redemption thing. So… were you really that out of it?"

So Steve had decided to get involved. Gabrielle knew Jack would never understand, but it said a lot about Steve's genuine guilt over the things he had done while drunk. "Yeah," she admitted. "I know that's not an excuse and some part of me was aware and I just… I couldn't fight it. I remember knowing it felt all wrong but I couldn't grasp why. Like I was in a fog."

"I couldn't stop thinking about you when I was with Rachel," he said, and although she flinched to hear him bring it up, she was glad to hear it – even if it had been at Rachel's expense. "I kept thinking of the first night we were together, kissing her on the drive, going past Dan in the lounge… and how much I wanted to be with you."

"Jack, I'm so sorry."

"It's that I saw it that bothers me the most. I think if I hadn't, if you'd just told me about it, I could have put it into context. But every time I think about it, I see the fact you were still wearing your engagement ring. It's this stupid detail that I keep coming back to. But if it's worth anything, that's kind of fading. I'm trying to focus on the fact you were too out of it to know who you were with. I know I haven't always done the right thing by you in the past and you've been a lot more understanding."

"Thankyou."

The look on his face changed and he met her eyes. He'd come to a decision, she realized, and she felt sick with nervousness. "Gabby, if you let yourself get into a situation like that again, that's it. You shouldn't have been so stupid as to be doing drugs with him in the first place. And I don't want you seeing him. At all. I don't care that needs you. He has his sponsor. I need you more, farmgirl. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future but for now I don't want you to have anything to do with him. And you need to get tested. And I want you to pick out a new engagement ring. I'm going to be reminded of what happened every time I see it."

Gabrielle gasped. She'd been hoping for a reconciliation, but this – "Jack are you serious? You still want to marry me?"

"I just said that, didn't I?"

"Oh, God." She suddenly felt very dizzy. "Oh, God, Jack, I'm going to –"

In a second she was in his arms and crying hysterically against his chest. "I thought I'd have to live the rest of my life without you," she sobbed.

He tilted her head back so he could kiss her and she melted into his arms and kissed him hungrily. She'd do him in the tea room if he wanted her. "I missed you, I love you, baby, oh, God, oh God…" she started babbling incoherently before she grunted from the sudden stab in her abdomen.

"Something wrong?" he asked, looking concerned. She'd worried she'd never see that look again, the look when you love someone to distraction and worry they're hurt.

She smiled at him. "No, Jack, it's –" she took his hands in hers and placed them over her stomach. "Can you feel that?" she asked. His eyes widened at the feel of his unborn child kicking. "I swear to God it's yours. I know from the timing. But I'll give you a blood test if you want."

He knew she was telling the truth. Just the fact she was willing to take a blood test – she wasn't the type to make an offer like that without being willing to go through with it. He ran his hands along her abdomen. He knew her body well and – "You're three months pregnant," he said. "How long have you known?"

"Since you left. Jack, I wanted to tell you but I wanted you to love me for myself, not for the baby."

"It doesn't matter." Suddenly his face brightened into a massive grin. "Oh, God, we're having a baby!" He lifted her up and spun her around in joy. She had never seen him smile like that.

Suddenly the door burst open. It was Frank. "What the hell – I thought you were arguing about something." But it was obvious by the way she was in his arms and he was smiling like a child on Christmas morning that they had reconciled. "I thought you'd never get your act together, Quade."

"When can your family get down?" he asked.

She knew what was he thinking. "Next weekend?" she offered.

He turned to Frank. "We're getting married next weekend," He turned back to Gabrielle. "I don't want to wait. We've been through enough already that I feel like if we don't do it, we'll keep screwing around. I know you wanted something special but –"

"I want to be married to you," she said. "I don't care about anything else." They kissed, and forgot completely that Farnk was in the room.

"Oh, the pair of you," he said. "Go home."

_This was meant to be the final chapter but I've added a short epilogue that encompasses Annie's death and Dan and Ricki's engagement - so send in your feedback or I'm withholding it :p_


	11. Chapter 11

_Hey guys! I didn't intend for there to be an 11th chapter but today the idea struck me: why not have a prologue about six months later? I've screwed up the timing a bit again (Dan proposes the week _before_ Bart gets back) but I like to think I mostly got it._

_Let and Mulysa, because you were so good about reviewing I decided not to withhold it anymore. Mulysa, I do have a few fics in mind but it will depend on being able to find cheap internet between now and going back home. Plus I'm depressed that it looks like they're putting Steve and gabrielle back together._

Jack let himself in the front door to be greeted by the smell of roat beef wafting through the house from the kitchen. He was immediately hungry. He walked into the kitchen where Gabrielle was preparing a salad and wrapped his right arm around her waist and threaded the fingers on his left hand through hers, taking in how small her hand seemed against his and admiring the way their wedding bands shone. He nuzzled her neck. "Where's Ella?" he asked.

"Charlotte's with him," Gabrielle murmered. It was hard to concentrate when Jack was doing that. Her pregnancy had only made him sweeter and more attentive, and it hadn't stopped after she had given birth a month ago. "I thought maybe we could arrange something regular with her so she can have time off Zach. It can't be much harder loking after two babies instead of one and he really needs a father-figure in his life."

"Sounds good." He was nibbling on her ear now. "You didn't have to go to all this trouble for me."

"I like to, Jack, you know that. And if you're not going to let me work, the least I can do is keep things in order at home."

He chuckled. _Not letting her work _was a bit of an overstatement. But since they didn't exactly pay surgical and emergency medicine registrars peanuts, on top of what Mary had left him, on top of what his mother had left him, Gabrielle didn't need to work and if she didn't need to work it had been easy to convince her that her time was better spent with Ella than running the ED nursing staff.

_Ella_. Eleanor Rebecca Quade, his daughter, born a month ago. Everytime he thought about her, his heart soared. And he thought about her a lot. He showed her picture to anyone who was interested - and anyone who couldn't demonstrate _dis_interested well enough to make Jack back off. Every other accomplishment in his life had faded to nothing the first time he'd held her. He hadn't known it was possible to love someone so completely without having it returned. He kissed Gabrielle on the head. It was hard to say which of his girls he loved the most. "You're good to me," he murmered huskily. Sometimes he thought about what an idiot he'd been, how close he'd come to losing her and it frightened him. He glanced over to the new boquet of roses in a vase on the bench. They'd been inundated with flowers since Ella had been born. "Who are they from?" he asked.

She wasn't going to lie. "Steve," she admitted. She felt Jack tense up slightly before relaxing. She had kept track of him via her parents, but she hadn't brought him up since that day Jack had forgiven her and felt his baby kick against her stomach.

"Where is he now?" he asked.

She was relieved he wasn't going to push it. She knew he was trying hard to get over it. A few times she sensed that his thoughts had wandered momentarily to that horrible night he'd walked in on them but those moments were getting further and further apart. And never since Ella's birth. "Queensland. I think he had some bridges to try and rebuild. Listen, how was Bart?" she asked, eager to get off the subject.

"A bit distant. I asked him how he was doing and he said he was fine - you could tell he wasn't but I didn't push it. The guy's just come back from burying his girlfriend and the first colleague he comes across is a disgustingly happy newlewed and new father. I can't imagine what a kick in the teeth _that_ would have been." Actually, he could, which is why he had been agitated to get home, so much so that Zoe had let him go because a distracted Jack was liable to do more harm than good.

"Poor guy." She shivered, thinking the same thing Jack was, that life could be so finite and love gone before you knew it. "It seems like no-one is having much success in the relationship stakes." Cate and Mike had split after just a few weeks, and if you paid close attention, you should still see the sadness behind Zoe's professional demeanour.

"Actually, I have some good news for you. We are going to be going to another wedding soon. Dan made a very public proposal and Ricki accepted."

Gabrielle gasped. "Jack, that's wonderful. Wait - what do you mean, _very public_?"

"That's partly my fault. We had a patient who was being a nuisance so I put him in a consult room with a baby monitor and things went a little awry. But it was actually very cute and I think she's angling to ask you to be bridesmaid but doesn't want to risk her boss saying no."

"Jack, I'm so - that's great for them!" She nestled into his arms. "You think they'll ever be as happy as we are?"

"Nope. But they can get close."

She turned around to kiss him. "You realise it's just about two years before we first met?" she asked.

"Yep. Which is why I bought you _this_."

He handed her a jewelry box. Inside contained a thick white gold bracelet, inscribed inside _friends first and forever_. Their wedding vows had included a pact that they should be adult enough to always be friends, no matter what else happened. That they both knew with instinct borne stronger than reason, stronger than logic the situation would never be downgraded back to friendship was a moot point; they had both come to a place where they had the love and maturity to be friends first and forever. "Jack, I love you," she said in a horase voice.

"I love you, too," he said.

**The end.**


End file.
